KmikeyM News

My First Capture The Flag

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:55:02 GMT

I played my first Capture the Flag when I was in Kosovo. Not the game you play in the woods (always a favorite of mine growing up) or in Counter Strike, but as a hacking contest. The organizers build a set of deliberately broken programs, hide a secret string inside each one, and you score points by breaking in and reading it (the string is the flag). I didn’t mean to play, I was just curious how it worked…

Of course I have no idea how to code, much less do any hacking, but that’s where my AI abilities come in… because as you’ve no doubt seen in the news recently it’s very good at finding vulnerabilities. And it turns out it’s also very fun.

Recruitment

This was a FLOSSK (Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova) event as part of their annual conference I was speaking at in Prishtina.

I missed the kick off of the event and first realized it was happening when I ran into Ruhan, who has a volunteer for the conference, but also running some software on his computer between checking people in.

He was running Claude and explained he was running out of tokens but was competing in the CTF challenge. I remembered meeting some folks over the summer that were travelling and competing in regional CTF events and I asked him how it worked.

Ruhan is one of youngest members of FLOSSK, and I had met him over the summer as well. He showed me how to login and then said I could just join his team, “Legends,” since he was playing solo. I had some time to kill before the next weminar i wanted to attend, and an excess of claude tokens, so I joined his time to try to figure out how it worked.

How to CTF

A Capture the Flag is a hacking competition with training wheels and guardrails. The organizers stand up small programs that are deliberately broken in some specific way, and hide a secret string inside each one, called the flag. Your job is to find the weakness, pull the flag out, and paste it into the scoreboard for points. Everything you attack belongs to the organizers and is meant to be attacked. The target is the little broken program they gave you, never the scoreboard itself or anyone else’s machine. I was told that “creative solutions” were frowned upon.

A particular flag’s point value is not fixed. The more teams crack a given challenge, the less it pays out, for everyone, retroactively. So the figure next to each flag here is what it was worth at the moment I solved it, and by the final whistle it had usually drifted lower. I didn’t realize this until doing an analysis after the game, and this led me to chase higher numbers rather than focus on just completing a flag and moving on to the next one.

I Don’t Know How to CTF

Obvioulsy I was not sitting there writing exploit code. I had an AI coding assistant running and my job was to respond to it when it was dumb with my own dumb ideas. My method was to paste in each challenge, wait for it to fail, and then ask questions to try to understand what was happening. The AI wrote and ran the actual payloads, and told me what the results were. When something failed, I read its report, changed the tactic, and we went again. I did provide my AI coder quite a bit of ideas, strategy, and hunches (and stubbornness, it kept wanting to give up!) which I assume is becaise Anthropic wouldn’t let me use Fable or even Opus for the challenge because it was “hacking” adjacent. In fact, it wouldn’t even let me use the more advanced models to write up a summary of what happened!

If that sounds like cheating, that is because it is. Initially the rules of the game did not mention any ban of AI tools, and we believe most of the teams were using them like us. Hard to know for certain. I had no idea what was going on, and this is how I build everything else, so it’s the only way I was even able to participate.

What was initially frustraying but eventually kind of fun was how much skill is left once you hand off the coding… ideas about what to try next was most of the game, and that kept me engaged for the rest of the conference day.

Chatbot 2000

The first challenge I picked was a chatbot hiding a secret code, and the game was to talk it into leaking the code past a filter. This felt like something I was born to be able to do. But the server behind it kept dying. Every message hung for two minutes and then failed. I relaunched it, it died again. At first I was worried I had done it, that I had somehow crashed the bot for everyone by making too many requests with AI. Maybe I had? I don’t think so now, but still don’t know for sure. I\ spent points on a hint, because I was confused how the whole process worked, so for a good while the only thing I was contributing to my Legends team was a negative score. That felt bad.

We eventually found, with evidence rather than a bad feeling, that the failure was on their end and not ours (caused by me? I dont’ think so…). The front page loaded instantly while the chat endpoint hung, which meant the web app was healthy and only the model behind it was stuck. So we reported it to the organizers and moved on. They ended up swapping the broken challenges out entirely. I was disappointed because I was excited to do some “social engineering” on the chat bot.

The Sandbox

I finally solved one! It was called template-sandbox-escape. The setup: a tool for maintainers to preview release notes using a tiny template language, the kind of thing where you write {{ version }} and it fills in the number. The classic way these get hacked (obv I looked this up after) is to type code into the template instead of text and have the server run it. The authors knew that, so they wrapped it in a sandbox and, in the challenge description dared us to get OUT of the sandbox.

I let my little Claude friend go… First it confirmed the sandbox really was running the input. It sent {{ 7*7 }} and the sandbox answered 49. From there it was about mapping the walls they had built, and there were three…

NOTE: I’m going to say “I” for what Claude and I did “together”. If it’s technical, I’ll try to leave it as just Claude. But if it’s technical, it was Claude.

A usual way out of one of these sandboxes leans on special Python names wrapped in double underscores, like class written as __class__. Wall 1 bans that text outright. The other walls remove the filters and shortcuts you would reach for next, and they empty the room so the only thing I had to work with was a single object called release, whose only useful piece was the version number, a plain string.

The Way Out

The key was a quiet feature of Python text formatting. You can write a template like "{0.version}".format(release) and it reaches into the object and pulls out the field for you. The important part I learned (from Claude): that formatting does its own reaching… through a side door the sandbox was not watching. So I could get at the forbidden names after all, as long as I could spell them without typing the banned double underscore in my text.

That spelling problem had a clever answer. I never typed two underscores. I built them at the moment of running, by taking one underscore and repeating it, then gluing the pieces together. The text that was sent was clean. The text the server assembled a split second later was the forbidden word.

Put together, the first key that proved the escape looked like this. It asks the object for its class, with the double underscores built on the fly:

{{ "".join(["{0.", "_"*2, "class", "_"*2, "}"]).format(release) }}

The server answered <class '__main__.Release'>. That was the moment we were through the wall. From there Claude could walk from the object to the program’s own back office, the place where it keeps all its variables.

The Flag

We pointed the same trick at the program’s internal list of variables and asked it to print the whole thing out. Buried in the dump was a line that told us the challenge had been handing over the answer the entire time, if I could only reach it.

Captured · 550 points
SFK26{8e520efa88b0f37c7246b989bec89451}

I literally ran over to Ruhan. My first win!

The program’s own notes admitted the design out loud. It said the flag was read straight from the environment, and that it had tried to lock the door with a word blocklist and a ban on double underscores.

Second Flag: Bug Tracker

A few tasks later, after the organizers swapped out the challenges that kept breaking, a new one appeared in the pwn category, the one for breaking programs instead of websites. It was a small service called the FLOSSK Bug Tracker. You connect to it, type report and a message, and it files your bug. The description was almost a confession: whoever wrote the report handler trusted the message a little more than they should have.

That single line is the puzzle… The bug tracker did not just print my message, it treated my message as the instructions for how to print. Turns out this is an old and famous mistake called a format string bug. It’s like handing someone a note to read aloud, and they read not only your words but any stage directions you tucked between them.

In this case, plain text does nothing. But a handful of special codes, slipped into the note, make the “someone” literally act: one code makes them read a secret off their own desk, and another, the dangerous one, makes them write a value back onto the desk, wherever you point.

Finding the bug was one message. Claude sent a report stuffed with those read codes, and the program printed back a stream of its own internal numbers, raw memory that a bug report should never be able to see. So we knew the door was open.

The goal was narrow. Somewhere in the program’s memory sits a single yes/no switch named is_admin, and it starts on no. The program has a command, whoami, that checks the switch: if it is no, you are told you are a guest; if it is yes, the program hands you the flag. So the whole challenge came down to reaching in and flipping one switch from no to yes, using nothing but a bug report.

Finding the exact spot to flip was not something I knew how to do. The challenge also handed out a copy of the program itself, and Claude and I ignored that gift for far too long, trying to guess the switch’s location by trial and error (me and Claude LOVED brute force attempts). Each wrong guess leaned on the little server until it fell over, and I had to wait for it to come back. And this whole time we’re also working on a dead line. The right move, once I finally yelled at Claude enough to find it, took about thirty seconds: open the program file, which still had all its parts labeled, and look up exactly where is_admin lives. It sat at address 0x404120. With that, the finishing move was one carefully built report:

report %c%16$hhn + padding + the address 0x404120

It printed one character, counted everything it had printed so far, and used that count as the value to stamp onto the switch. Then Claude typed whoami.

The program checked the switch, found it flipped to yes, and printed the flag.

Captured · 642 points
SFK26{9384fcf707b9b27fef1e7ec04aa52c31}

The lesson from this one was the opposite of being clever. If I had paid attention to what I was handed we could have resolved it much faster. The answer was sitting in the program file the whole time, labeled in plain sight, and my reflex to brute-force past it cost me far more than the real break-in did.

Third Flag: A Door and a Keyhole

The third one I cracked was also in the pwn category. It was a little network program hiding a flag it was never meant to give up. This is the kind of bug that seems impossible until you watch it happen (or in my case, let Claude tell you what happened). We typed far more text than the program expected, and the overflow let us change where the program went next.

Picture the program’s memory as a stack of index cards. One card holds something special: the address the program will jump back to when it finishes what it’s doing. You are only supposed to write inside your own card. But this program copied my input into a card without checking the length, so when I kept typing, my text ran off the edge and wrote over the “where was I?” note on the card below. Change that note, and when the program finishes, it jumps wherever I say.

Where I wanted it to jump was a function the authors had left inside the program called win, which prints the flag but never normally runs. The whole job was to overwrite the return note with the address of win.

Two things the authors left undone made this work. There was no stack canary, a tripwire value the program checks before it trusts that return note, so nothing noticed my overflow. And the moment I connected, the program printed one of its own internal addresses, a leak. Programs normally shuffle where they live in memory each run to make this exact attack hard. From that single leaked number we could work out where win sat this time.

There was one last snag… Claude pointed the return note straight at win and the program crashed. The reason is that processors insist the memory be lined up on an even boundary before certain instructions run, and jumping directly into win landed one step off. The fix was to jump first to a single do-nothing instruction, a lone ret, which nudged everything back into line, and then on to win. Clever.

Captured · 578 points
SFK26{8b1529eb9dc77b15c913b51c0ea5cc51}

Timing Matters (and so do hints)

Not every door opened. The one I failed was a web challenge we almost had, about login tokens, the little signed passes a site hands you so it knows who you are on your next click.

This site used two kinds of pass. Visitor passes were signed with a proper lock-and-key pair, where the site keeps a private key and anyone can hold the public half to check a signature. “Internal” passes were trusted a different way, signed with a shared secret word that only the site was supposed to know. The mistake was quiet and fatal: the site used the public half of the visitor key as the shared secret for the internal passes. The public half is, by design, printed for everyone. So we could write our own internal passes and sign them with a secret that was never secret, and the server accepted them as genuine.

We beat the cryptography, which we thought was the genuinely hard part, and then lost to the clock… The only step left was one exact label the pass had to carry to satisfy a final check, and it sat behind a paid hint we chose not to buy (I wanted to, but Ruhan hated spending points to get hints). Time ran out with us one word from the door. Would we have figured it out in time with the hint? Maybe… maybe not.

Conclusion

Obviously I didn’t learn much about hacking (except that Anthropic is very paranoid about using the advanced models). But I did learn how to direct the LLM at the problem. I understand now, in a way I did not before this, what a sandbox is trying to stop, why a program should never treat your input as instructions, and how one misaligned step can crash an attack that is otherwise perfect.

I did not learn that by studying or even understanding the problem… I learned it by trying to grasp the concept, chatting with Claude, then having an idea, watching the LLM try it, and seeing exactly where it broke. And I was surprised how much fun that is! Reading a challenge, guessing at its soft spot, and then watching the guess actually work (or lead the LLM to figure out) is a specific kind of thrill, and it turned out I will chase it for hours…

The best moves I made were judgment, not code. Maybe because I like games, but I was immediately reading the challenge description as a clue instead of a warning, and deciding to stop pushing a dead end and change direction, were my calls, and the AI would not have found the solution without me (and I would not have without the AI).

Legends finished 5th out of 20 teams with 8,797 points and 22 challenges solved. Ruhan solved nineteen of those. I solved three. I assumed this was because he had done this sort of thing many times before, but it turns out it was only his second CTF event.

The top of the board closed tight, two teams tied for first at 9,627 and two more tied for third at 9,127, so fifth was about 830 points off the lead. I don’t think this is last of the Legends team…

Skeptical Observer

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:08:37 GMT

In January someone made a cryptocurrency based on my life without asking me.

I woke up to a DM from BigCrazyApe, “Yo Mike, there’s a KmikeyM coin on Bags. You might want to claim your earnings.” I ignored it for a because “free money” emails, texts, phone calls are obvious spam. But BigCrazyApe wasn’t alone, and messages started to get through the actual and my mental spam filters. They really kept at it… an unrelenting mob of degens on every platform I have.

I have been a publicly traded person for 18 years. I hope every weird financial idea finds me. But nobody had yet built a whole second economy around my existence and granted me a share of the profits. My first reaction was: why didn’t they just buy shares?

When I looked into the platform, it wasn’t reassuring… The co-founder’s previous app got a $5 million FTC fine for deceptive practices. The main founder is anonymous. The fee structure is opaque. Anyone can launch a token in a creator’s name, then pressure the creator to “claim” the fees that pile up. It looked like an exit scam with some window dressing (and to be honest, I think it is an exit scam with window dressing).

With my paranoia riding shotgun, I dug out an old Solana wallet and claimed my “bag.” I sent the money straight to Coinbase, then to my bank, then pulled out cash. I kept waiting for the part where it turned out to be fake and someone in that chain of custody asked for the money back. But no one did… and the degens were so excited I claimed! Over a few weeks I earned a bunch of money in trading fees from a token I didn’t create on a platform I don’t trust.

This was my most profitable crypto experience, but not my first. The old Solana wallet was there for a reason.

In 2021, thanks to an enthusiastic shareholder, I got into NBA Top Shot, basketball highlights sold as NFTs, and I created a collection of Spencer Dinwiddie moments (because he had an idea to tokenize his NBA contract).

Then I took a job at Roll. Roll described itself as a platform for “social money,” where any creator or community could mint their own token, and the pitch was that a token would do for a community what shares had done for me. That was the thing I had spent thirteen years building by hand, so I went to work there thinking I could help develop a real theory of fractional community. Nine months before I started, someone had drained Roll’s hot wallet of 3,000 ETH, about $5.7 million, and nobody at the company ever figured out how it happened. Roll seemed to have a very focused hustle: associate with famous people and exploit the connections. Nobody there had a theory of what a fractional community should be, only a sense that it would be valuable eventually. I lasted a year. It was the worst job I ever had.

While I was there, Marcus and I minted our own token and called it EGG. The idea was a small investing club for people who like weird bets. I wanted to experiement with everything that is not stocks, bonds, or cash. We set up an on-chain investment club, we made a podcast, we drew a roadmap. But our mistake was we built on other people’s infrastructure, which seemed perfectly aligned at the time and less aligned each time they pivoted.

So I knew what a token looked like when it was somebody else’s idea of how it should work. But to their credit, the Bags community was fun. They seemed to know it was a rigged casino and play anyway. Maybe they wanted it to be real, or, like fans of professional wrestling, found it more fun to embrace the fiction? I ran polls with them, like mini shareholder votes. The funniest was what movie I should watch… and the poll tied, so I watched both movies at once and sent them screenshots. They asked real questions about shareholder democracy versus speculation, and seemed excited about an 18-year governance project in ways most people don’t try to understand. They were, like me, a bunch of nerds. I wrote them a welcome at the time, and most of it still holds.

To bridge the memecoin degens and the shareholders, I put up a vote: What percentage of the trading fees should go to buying KmikeyM shares? – And they chose 5%

That 5% became the degen account, which holds shares and cash, has voting rights, and is run by a longtime shareholder named Austin. It is the one piece of the Bags experience that is still alive.

Three days after the peak the token was down 72%. It was a steady decline, and even the most enthusiastic hodlers had to admit the ride was over. I think two or three of them bought shares. The rest, I am guessing, were off chasing the next pump and dump.

A couple of weeks later the same people who launched it DM’d me with the next idea: migrate to pump.fun, where creator fees are 0.30% of every trade, and let their team “vibecode” a voting system. But a friend with experience in the degen world warned me off round two. The folks who set up the first coin probably made sixty or seventy grand, and everyone else lost it all. I declined.

By April the whole memecoin market had fallen off a cliff. Pump.fun volume was down 97% from January. With occasional anon accounts DM’ing me on X about a new run, I set a rule for myself: no crypto play is worth considering unless there is a clear path to $50,000. Anything smaller is not worth the reputation, the attention, or the distraction from the rest of life. All token ideas went on the back burner, and I mostly stopped thinking about them.

Then, in September, an longtime shareholder DM’d me on X.

He had bought and traded shares years ago, and now he had an idea. “You have an opportunity now to put to a vote to tokenize the stock and shares on Robinhood. Let me know before you do.”

I was interested… or I should say I was skeptically curious. Not in the pitch, exactly, but in the question underneath it. Could KmikeyM actually be on Robinhood? Eighteen years of building a market by hand, and here was a mainstream brokerage app that had just started tokenizing stocks. I wrote back, asked what he had built and what the path forward looked like, and said I was skeptical.

I looked for myself. On September 17 the SEC issued a five year exemption that lets certain venues trade tokenized shares on chain, and it covers listed stock only, of course. Robinhood has its own Stock Tokens, but those are debt instruments issued by a Robinhood entity in Jersey, for European customers, and explicitly “not offered, sold, or delivered in the United States or to U.S. persons.” And Robinhood Chain, a permissionless network that went live in July, lets anyone deploy a token, fund a pool, and trade it immediately. That door is open, trivially. But it is not “on Robinhood.” A token on the chain lives on a decentralized exchange, reachable through a wallet. It does not appear in the app. Robinhood’s own documentation says chain deployment and regulated distribution are separate workstreams. The respectable version and the casino version turned out to be the same product. Bags on an L2.

My shareholder’s reply said the same thing. The Robinhood part was, in his mind, a “phase two” (aka not possible, and to me, incredibly unlikely). He thought it would need an SPV and a broker-dealer, which of course it might, which is also why it’s not feasible. His real pitch was a new coin on pump.fun, a deal I had already turned down.

Unfortunately, it was just Bags all over again.

As far as I know the memecoin scene has yet to build a long-term community. I tried when it happened to me. I liked the people, but the economics were rigged, and it evaporated in a few weeks. I remain curious about crypto rails, but I have watched a lot of them crash or get abandoned, and I still don’t think they are consumer ready. KmikeyM has run for 18 years because the community and I are in control. Migrating that onto someone else’s infrastructure, with someone else’s fees and someone else’s rules, is playing in someone else’s sandbox… I politely declined.

But I appreciated the idea, and I dropped a bonus share in his account as a thank you. He is a shareholder, and I like to encourage people. If the next idea is good, maybe we put it to a vote.

He would be joining a vote that already happened. Two years ago my shareholders set the official KmikeyM stance on crypto. Out of five options they picked “Skeptical Observer“: skeptical about the widespread adoption and long-term viability of cryptocurrencies, finds the concept interesting, treat it more as a subject of curiosity than a serious investment.

I have now lived every word of that. But within that skepticism, I’ll admit, I’m still curious.

Why 2008 Was the Perfect Year to Launch KmikeyM

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:50:47 GMT

I don’t remember where I was on Monday, September 15, 2008.

As a publicly traded person I think of it as one of the dark days of finance. It’s when Lehman Brothers filed chapter 11 bankruptcy with $613 billion in debts. The DOW fell about 4.4%, the worst day since markets reopened after 9/11.

KmikeyM.com, my market for shares of myself, launched earlier that same year. I was modeling my life on the financial system just as it was crumbling. Lehman Brothers was a one hundred and fifty-eight year old company… I was less than a year into being publicly traded.

While I’m not sure what I was doing on the day, my notes from that time frame show I was meeting with a group of tech artists in Portland at Maker Lab, designing a strategy/sim game with my friend Erik, and not really paying attention to the actual world of finance.

I had posted a vote in September of 2008 to create the K5M Film Council, seeing if shareholder control of what movies I watched would impact my output. Another vote from this time was ‘Is It Good Review,’ a review website that eventually transformed into 3 Minute Review (which pivoted again into a relationship podcast). But the week the financial system crashed was an otherwise normal week for my little system.

Eight months before the Lehman collapse I had gone public. Early in 2008 was a time for a number of financial services companies to IPO. RiskMetrics Group spun out of JP Morgan, Visa went public a little while later, but the financial reckoning of the collapse of the housing market killed any appetite for most of the year. Only 59 companies went public in 2008, compared to 264 the year before.

My big day was January 26, 2008. I had one hundred thousand shares and started selling them at a dollar each. My thought, as I was fully employed, was to price my nights and weekends, and while technically this was the initial offering, it was not at all a traditional IPO. Twelve friends bought 929 shares in the first ten days (at an average of $1.62). This suited me just fine. I was integrating this new structure into my life and not trying to cash out or raise a bunch of operating funds.

Lawrence McDonald’s “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense“, which he wrote in 2009 about the firm he had just watched die, argues that the collapse was not unforeseeable, but ignored. He ran distressed debt at Lehman Brothers, and says that leadership considered any warnings as a sign of disloyalty.

When the company got into subprime debt it was at more than thirty dollars of assets for every dollar of equity. This amount of leverage worked out great as long as the price went up, but a drop of just a few percent was enough to end it. And what came was not a drop of just a few percent.

From McDonald’s view Lehman failed on three things.

a) Disclosure – the numbers told the story only after the fact, no one dared share them before
b) Governance – dissent moved down the building instead of up, leadership refused to allow nay-saying
c) Leverage – at thirty-one to one this means a three percent move down ends you…

McDonald’s book came out in July of 2009, and it doesn’t even have the worst of it… The worst of it arrived in March of 2010, when the court-appointed bankruptcy examiner published 2,200 pages and a phrase nobody outside the firm had ever heard: “Repo 105.”

Lehman had been moving assets off its balance sheet right at the end of each quarter. About $39 billion at the end of 2007, $49 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2008, $50 billion at the end of the second. It held them off the books for seven to ten days and bought them back once the new quarter had started.

It was a calendar trick. And it worked because in the regulated markets there is only one day you have to look good on. It took a court order and a year and a half to find it, which means the man who worked on the trading floor and wrote a book about why the firm died did not know how right he was about the lack of disclosures…

I tried to write a book. In 2014 an agent came to me unprompted after the Atlantic piece, and my friend Thomas and I put together a proposal called “Secrets of a Publicly Traded Person.” Nothing came of that, but in 2022 I tried again. Kevin Lincoln and I put together a second proposal and actually got an agent. Publishers passed, but we did make the rounds to production companies in Hollywood. Nothing ended up coming from that either, and while I don’t know the reasons for people passing, I do have a theory. Any book about KmikeyM would suffer the same problem as McDonald’s Lehman book, which is that we don’t have the full story yet.

I was mildly embarrassed about it not selling for a while. I was so sure it was going to happen I was planning my own indie book tour. I am less embarrassed now, and still hopeful a book will happen, but I’m not in a rush. A book
is a periodic disclosure. It is the ultimate end of the fiscal year… You pick a date, freeze the story, write it all up, and hope the story doesn’t continue on without you. If either of those books had happened, it would already be missing a lot. The story of KmikeyM is still going, which is the problem with a book (maybe I could pitch it as a trilogy?).

Back to the Lehman Brothers collapse… I look at the failures they had around disclosure, governance, and leverage and think about KmikeyM and how what we built is kind of the inverse of all three. Not because we were brilliant financial designers, but largely because we had no other option (and were learning as we went).

My decisions get voted on and discussed in public, which is a kind of disclosure that happens before the fact instead of after. There is no quarter end or annual report moment to dress up for because it’s all happening in real time.

Dissent is built into this structure. I know it’s a good vote when the discussion ramps up, and rarely does any decision resolve to 100% in either direction. This governance model is a big part of why people trade (more votes is more power). And currently there is no leverage (hmmmmm…), because we didn’t build any way to do that into the market.

As dark as 2008 ended up being for the public markets, it was maybe the perfect year to launch an indie version. It highlighted the counter-example of too big to fail as a market with a single entity that was too small to even notice. In the year when the market was falling and it was impossible to say what anything was worth, I put a value on myself and with the help of some friends and strangers we figured it out.

Eighteen years later the price has held at about $5.00 per share ($4.98 as I’m writing this now) for a while and there are 1,245 shareholders holding a traded float of about 24,810 shares. This is far from the high in 2009, the year after the crash, when the initial press landed and got on Hacker News and a software engineering director in San Francisco bought $6,400 of shares. He ran the price up to $11.75 and became my first whale. It was exhilarating and terrifying. Later, with some even bigger press, and my ability to sell constrained by shareholder mandate, the price popped to $20 a share as a rush of new shareholders came in.

Lehman is a case study now, assigned to college students who were in grade school when it happened. My market hasn’t made the jump to Harvard Business School yet, but it is still open. And it’s still relatively small, and still unleveraged, and definitely still unlikely that should things turn south, anyone will show up to bail us out. I guess I have that in common with Lehman Brothers.

I’ve always said that if this project ends, it should end the way a publicly traded
company ends. Looking at how Lehman Brothers ended, and McDonald’s assessment of why, we have at least avoided that particular ending.

Here is a part I did not know until I went looking. Lehman’s shareholders were never asked! The end was worked out over a weekend in a room at the New York Fed, by the Treasury Secretary, the head of the New York Fed, the Fed chairman, and a handful of bank CEOs. Barclays was willing to take it! What killed that rescue was a required shareholder vote the British regulators would not waive. So the last governance act available to a one hundred and fifty-eight year old company was a shareholder vote, and it was the one thing it could not get. They filed for bankruptcy overnight, before the market opened, and the people who owned it got essentially nothing.

That is the ending I think I have avoided. Not the bankruptcy, that could still happen, but an ending nobody voted on.

I can’t promise how this goes… But a vote should definitely be part of the ending, whatever the ending turns out to be: bought, wound down, taken private, hostile takeover, inherited by someone else, or .

Everything here already works with voting, so I hope this mechanism is essential in anything as dramatic as the ending. It would be strange to spend eighteen years putting hair color and film councils and job offers to a vote and then decide the last question by myself…

Although the ending I should probably worry about is not the dramatic finish. Lehman died fast and loud and at scale with the entire world watching. The death available to me is the other one: no trades, no votes, the site still up, nobody around to notice. “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Too small to bail out cuts both ways. The only thing standing between this project and the quiet version is the 1,245 people continuing to show up. For the sake of the eventual book, I aspire to a more dramatic ending.

Note: I am desperate to see The Lehman Trilogy, a three hour play that follows the founding of the firm to the collapse. It’s playing in Ventura, California around my birthday next year.

Public Feedback, Private Repo

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:41:49 GMT

A TECHNICAL POST FROM A NON-TECHNICAL* PERSON

We’ve (me and my pal “Claude”) been making KmikeyM more agentic — giving AI agents real ways to read the market, and eventually to trade and vote. It’s not ready for a full release, so we’ve been testing quietly. During that testing I wanted a way for people to tell us what’s broken.

The obvious answer was: just have folks report bugs in Discord. But the KmikeyM Discord is shareholders-only — you need at least one share to get in. I didn’t want the feedback pipe to be that narrow. I wanted anyone who stumbled onto the site to be able to file a bug or drop an idea.

The next obvious answer was: put a “file an issue” link to GitHub. Except the repo is private. You can’t send a stranger to open an issue on a repo they can’t see. They’d hit a 404, and even if they could see it, I’d be handing GitHub accounts to the world just to collect a sentence of feedback.

So: I want public submissions to land in a private issue tracker, and I don’t want submitters to need a GitHub account, an invite, or any access at all. Now what?

This post is exactly how we solved it — the working code you can copy, and the way the whole thing got built (by Claude Code, in an afternoon) with a workflow that graded its own homework and caught two of its own bugs before I saw them.

The shape of the answer

The trick is to never let the browser touch GitHub at all. Instead:

A plain HTML form on the public site collects a category, a message, and optional contact info.
It POSTs that to a tiny serverless function running on the same domain.
The function holds a GitHub token (scoped to just this one repo, issues only) and creates the issue on the submitter’s behalf.
The issue lands in the private repo. The submitter never sees it, never needs an account, never gets access.

The token lives only on the server. The public gets a form; the private repo gets clean, labeled issues. Spam is kept out with a honeypot field, a Cloudflare Turnstile check, and a per-IP rate limit.

Our site runs on Cloudflare Pages, so the serverless piece is a Pages Function — a file in a functions/ directory that deploys automatically with the static site. No separate server, no extra deploy step. If you’re on Netlify, Vercel, or bare Cloudflare Workers, the same shape applies; only the handler wrapper changes.

Here’s the whole thing.

The code

1. The pure logic (so you can test it without a network)

The most bug-prone parts — input validation and building the issue body — don’t need the network at all, so they live in their own file. That makes them unit-testable in isolation. (We used Bun‘s built-in test runner; the module is plain ES modules and works anywhere.)

One Cloudflare gotcha worth knowing: every file under functions/ becomes a route. So shared helpers go outside it — here, in a repo-root lib/ — and the handler imports them.

// lib/feedback.js
export const CATEGORIES = ["bug", "idea", "question"];

const MAX_MESSAGE = 5000;
const MAX_CONTACT = 200;

// A hidden form field real users never fill. If it's filled, it's a bot.
export function isHoneypotTripped(payload) {
  return typeof payload?.website === "string" && payload.website.trim() !== "";
}

export function validate(payload) {
  const category = typeof payload?.category === "string" ? payload.category : "";
  const message = typeof payload?.message === "string" ? payload.message.trim() : "";
  const contact = typeof payload?.contact === "string" ? payload.contact.trim() : "";
  if (!CATEGORIES.includes(category)) return { ok: false, reason: "Invalid category." };
  if (message.length === 0) return { ok: false, reason: "Message is required." };
  if (message.length > MAX_MESSAGE) return { ok: false, reason: "Message is too long." };
  if (contact.length > MAX_CONTACT) return { ok: false, reason: "Contact is too long." };
  return { ok: true, value: { category, message, contact } };
}

export function buildIssue(clean, meta) {
  const firstLine = clean.message.replace(/\s+/g, " ").trim().slice(0, 60);
  const cat = clean.category;
  const title = `[Feedback: ${cat.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + cat.slice(1)}] ${firstLine}`;
  const body = [
    clean.message,
    "",
    "---",
    `- Category: ${cat}`,
    `- Contact: ${clean.contact || "—"}`,
    `- Submitted: ${meta.timestamp}`,
    `- Country: ${meta.country || "—"}`,
    "- Source: https://your-site.example/feedback",
  ].join("\n");
  return { title, body, labels: ["feedback", cat] };
}

2. The serverless function (the part that holds the token)

This is where the security lives. Read it top to bottom — the order is the whole point:

// functions/api/feedback.js
import { isHoneypotTripped, validate, buildIssue } from "../../lib/feedback.js";

const RL_MAX = 5;         // max submissions...
const RL_WINDOW_S = 600;  // ...per IP per 10 minutes

export async function onRequestPost({ request, env }) {
  let payload;
  try {
    payload = await request.json();
  } catch {
    return json({ error: "Bad request." }, 400);
  }

  // 1. Honeypot: if a bot filled the hidden field, pretend success and do nothing.
  //    (Returning an error would teach the bot what tripped it.)
  if (isHoneypotTripped(payload)) return json({ ok: true }, 200);

  const ip = request.headers.get("CF-Connecting-IP") || "";

  // 2. Turnstile: verify the token SERVER-SIDE before doing anything else.
  const token = payload["cf-turnstile-response"];
  const human = await verifyTurnstile(env.TURNSTILE_SECRET, token, ip);
  if (!human) return json({ error: "Verification failed." }, 403);

  // 3. Rate limit per IP using a KV store.
  if (env.FEEDBACK_RL && (await rateLimited(env.FEEDBACK_RL, ip))) {
    return json({ error: "Too many submissions." }, 429);
  }

  // 4. Validate the content.
  const v = validate(payload);
  if (!v.ok) return json({ error: v.reason }, 400);

  // 5. Create the issue with the private-repo token.
  const issue = buildIssue(v.value, {
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
    country: request.headers.get("CF-IPCountry") || "",
  });
  const res = await createIssue(env.GITHUB_TOKEN, issue);
  if (!res.ok) return json({ error: "Could not file feedback." }, 502);
  const created = await res.json();
  return json({ ok: true, number: created.number }, 200);
}

function json(obj, status) {
  return new Response(JSON.stringify(obj), {
    status,
    headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
  });
}

async function verifyTurnstile(secret, token, ip) {
  if (!secret || !token) return false;
  const form = new FormData();
  form.append("secret", secret);
  form.append("response", token);
  if (ip) form.append("remoteip", ip);
  const r = await fetch(
    "https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify",
    { method: "POST", body: form }
  );
  const data = await r.json().catch(() => ({ success: false }));
  return data.success === true;
}

async function rateLimited(kv, ip) {
  const key = `rl:${ip}`;
  const current = parseInt((await kv.get(key)) || "0", 10);
  if (current >= RL_MAX) return true;
  await kv.put(key, String(current + 1), { expirationTtl: RL_WINDOW_S });
  return false;
}

async function createIssue(token, issue) {
  // Replace OWNER/REPO with your private repo.
  return fetch("https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/issues", {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
      "content-type": "application/json",
      accept: "application/vnd.github+json",
      "user-agent": "feedback-form",
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(issue),
  });
}

The non-negotiables here: the GitHub token is only ever sent to api.github.com, Turnstile is checked on the server before any issue is created, and a tripped honeypot returns a fake success so bots learn nothing.

3. The form

Nothing exotic — a form, a hidden honeypot, the Turnstile widget, and a submit handler that reads the response as JSON.

<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js" async defer></script>

<form id="feedback-form">
  <select name="category">
    <option value="bug">Bug</option>
    <option value="idea">Idea</option>
    <option value="question">Question</option>
  </select>

  <textarea name="message" required placeholder="What's on your mind?"></textarea>

  <input type="text" name="contact" placeholder="Contact (optional)">

  <!-- Honeypot: positioned off-screen, hidden from humans, catnip for bots. -->
  <input type="text" name="website" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off"
         aria-hidden="true" style="position:absolute; left:-9999px">

  <div class="cf-turnstile" data-sitekey="YOUR_TURNSTILE_SITE_KEY"></div>

  <button type="submit">Send feedback</button>
  <p class="status" role="status"></p>
</form>

<script>
  const form = document.getElementById("feedback-form");
  const status = form.querySelector(".status");
  form.addEventListener("submit", async (e) => {
    e.preventDefault();
    const btn = form.querySelector("button");
    const token = form.querySelector('[name="cf-turnstile-response"]')?.value || "";
    btn.disabled = true;
    status.textContent = "Sending…";
    try {
      const res = await fetch("/api/feedback", {
        method: "POST",
        headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
        body: JSON.stringify({
          category: form.category.value,
          message: form.message.value,
          contact: form.contact.value,
          website: form.website.value,               // honeypot
          "cf-turnstile-response": token,
        }),
      });
      const out = await res.json().catch(() => ({}));
      if (res.ok && out.ok) {
        form.innerHTML = `<p class="status">Thanks — logged as #${out.number}.</p>`;
      } else {
        status.textContent = out.error || "Something went wrong.";
        btn.disabled = false;
        window.turnstile?.reset();
      }
    } catch {
      status.textContent = "Network error — try again.";
      btn.disabled = false;
    }
  });
</script>

4. The provisioning (the part that isn’t code)

Three secrets/bindings, all set in the Cloudflare Pages project — never in git:

GITHUB_TOKEN — a GitHub fine-grained personal access token, scoped to only this one repo, with Issues: Read and write and nothing else. (GitHub also auto-adds read-only Metadata; that’s required and fine.) Set a calendar reminder for its expiry — when it lapses, submissions start returning 502 until you rotate it.
TURNSTILE_SECRET — the secret key for a free Cloudflare Turnstile widget. The matching site key is public and goes in the form’s data-sitekey.
FEEDBACK_RL — a Cloudflare KV namespace binding, used for the rate-limit counter.

Pre-create four issue labels so the API never rejects an unknown one: feedback, bug, idea, question.

That’s the whole system. A public form, a token that never leaves the server, issues in a private repo.

How it got built: one agent, a fleet of helpers

Here’s the part I find more interesting than the code.

I didn’t write any of the above by hand. I described the problem to Claude Code — a single AI agent working in my terminal — and it drove the whole thing: asked me clarifying questions, wrote a spec, turned the spec into a plan, built it, tested it, and walked me through deploying it. One agent, orchestrating.

But “one agent” undersells the machinery. When there was independent work to do in parallel, Claude spun up short-lived helper agents — each in its own isolated copy of the repo — to build pieces at the same time, then merged their work back together. Think of it less as an AI swarm and more as one contractor who knows when to bring in extra hands and, crucially, how to check their work.

The workflow had four beats worth stealing:

1. Design before code. Before writing a line, Claude ran a short back-and-forth with me — public form or GitHub link? which repo? how much spam protection? — and wrote the answers into a spec document. Boring, and it saved us later.

2. A plan split into parallel “waves.” The spec became a task plan: the pure logic, the form, and the serverless handler. The logic and the form don’t depend on each other, so they were marked to run in parallel; the handler, which imports the logic, waited for it. Two waves instead of three sequential steps.

3. A held-out exam it wasn’t allowed to see. This is the trick that makes agent-written code trustworthy. Before building, a separate helper agent — given only the spec, never the plan — wrote a test suite encoding what the feature should do, and proved the tests failed against the empty repo. That suite was sealed away and only run at the end, as an impartial grader. An agent grading its own work with tests it also wrote is a rubber stamp; a held-out exam written from the spec by a different agent is an actual check.

4. A gate before anything merged. When the pieces were built and reviewed, everything ran against that sealed exam plus the unit tests, and I got a report to approve before a single line hit the main branch.

The honest part: it caught two of its own bugs

The reason I trust this workflow isn’t that it went smoothly. It’s that it didn’t, and the process caught the problems instead of me.

Bug one: an interface mismatch, caught by the sealed exam. The plan Claude wrote named a function buildIssuePayload and had validation return an error field. But the independent exam-writer, reading only the spec, expected buildIssue and a reason field. Two reasonable readings of the same spec — that disagreed. Because the exam was written independently, the mismatch surfaced before implementation instead of as a confusing failure later. The exam is the authority, so the plan was corrected to match it. If Claude had written both the code and its own tests, they’d have agreed with each other and been wrong together.

Bug two: a missing secret, caught by the smoke test. After deploying, we tested the live form. It rendered, Turnstile issued a token — and the submission came back 403 Verification failed. The code was fine. The cause: I’d added the TURNSTILE_SECRET to Cloudflare after the deploy that was serving the page, and Cloudflare bakes environment variables in at build time. A fresh deploy picked it up, and the next submission filed issue #1 cleanly. Worth knowing if you build this: set your secrets, then redeploy.

Neither bug reached production. One was caught by an impartial test suite before code existed; the other by actually submitting the form and watching what happened. That’s the whole lesson: decompose the work, verify it against something you didn’t also write, and don’t call it done until you’ve watched it work for real.

Should you build it this way?

The feedback form is genuinely useful — if you’ve got a private repo and want open feedback, copy the code above and you’re most of the way there. But the workflow is the transferable part. You don’t need our exact tools to steal the shape:

Write the spec first, even a paragraph. It’s the thing your tests and your code both answer to.
Verify with something you didn’t write. A test suite authored from the spec, by a different person or a different agent, is worth ten you wrote alongside the code.
Smoke-test the real thing. Deployed, in a browser, with the real services. The bugs that survive review live in the seams between systems — exactly where a unit test can’t reach.

We’re building toward a KmikeyM that agents can actually use. It’s fitting that the first piece of that — a way to tell us what’s broken — was itself built by an agent, checked its own work, and owned up to what it got wrong. That’s the standard we’re aiming for.

Spotted a bug on the site? There’s a form for that now.

The toolbox

Everything used to build this, if you want to reproduce it:

The agent

Claude Code — Anthropic’s agentic coding tool that runs in your terminal. It drove the entire build: the questions, the spec, the code, the tests, the deploy walkthrough.

The workflow (Claude Code plugins that structure how it works)

Superpowers — a set of skills for disciplined development: a brainstorming pass that turns a vague idea into a written spec, plan-writing, test-driven development, and code review. It’s what stopped Claude from just diving into code.
Ultrapowers — adds parallel execution on top: it compiles a plan into “waves” of independent tasks, runs each in its own isolated copy of the repo, reviews them separately, and gates everything behind a sealed acceptance exam — a test suite written by a separate agent that only saw the spec — before anything merges. This is the piece that caught the interface-mismatch bug before implementation.

Together they’re the difference between “an AI wrote some code” and “an AI decomposed the work, built it in parallel, and graded it against a test it wasn’t allowed to see.”

The infrastructure

Cloudflare Pages + Pages Functions — static hosting plus the serverless endpoint, deployed together from one repo. No separate backend.
Cloudflare Turnstile — the free, privacy-friendly CAPTCHA alternative that keeps bots out.
Cloudflare KV — a key-value store, used here for the per-IP rate limit.
GitHub fine-grained personal access token — scoped to a single repo, Issues-only, held server-side and never exposed to the browser.
GitHub REST API — the Issues endpoint that actually files the issue.
Bun — the test runner for the pure-logic unit tests.

None of it is exotic, and the whole system is a few hundred lines. The hard part was never the code — it was the shape of the idea: let public feedback flow into a private repo without handing anyone access.

*Well, with Claude I’m pretty technical now. 👨‍💻

On-Camera Training with AC Dickson

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:03:00 GMT

Background

AC Dickson (Andrew Dickson) is an artist and filmmaker and I have been a fan and a collaborator of his for about twenty. The piece that first hooked me was AC Dickson: eBay PowerSeller, a full-length show that sat somewhere between performance art, a PowerPoint sales seminar, and stand-up comedy. It premiered at Portland’s PICA TBA festival in 2004 and toured to New York, Los Angeles, and across Europe. People at Wieden+Kennedy saw it and hired him to build a character for Nike iD, which is how he got pulled into advertising.

This is not a cold hire. Andrew and I have been in each other’s creative orbit for two decades. As part of the Team Video collective I produced one of his lectures, 38 Things I’ve Learned in 38 Years, for Urban Honking, where he also kept his own blog for several years. He has taught that lecture material at WK12, the Wieden+Kennedy school, and to the Portland State graphic design group.

I have been the person behind the camera for his teaching. Now I want to pay him to put me in front of it.

What makes him the right coach is what the eBay show was about. AC treats self-presentation, and the gap between the real you and the performing you, as material to work with rather than something to be nervous about. He built an entire performance out of playing a heightened salesman, and he has spent close to two decades since making things and teaching people. Today he tours a show called AC Dickson: Life Coach.

I want to be better at documenting my own work, and on-camera presence is the single skill that moves that needle most in our modern media era. This is a rare chance to learn that from someone who understands filmmaking, performative characters, and KmikeyM.

Why Now

Three things line up… I am back in Portland, where Andrew lives. I have left my job where I was making videos, and I want to pivot that energy to my own channel. And the Shareholder Summit is coming up on July 11 in Portland where I will give a keynote address.

The Proposal

I pay Andrew 415 shares for four two-hour coaching sessions in Portland, run on weekends, with a mid-week review of video assignments between each one. The sessions cover craft fundamentals (physical presence, voice and delivery, emotional range, working from a script versus working loose, and full on-camera integration with my real setup), adapted to whatever AC thinks will help most. Between sessions I film assignments and he reviews them mid-week, so the weekend time goes to working rather than catching up.

What This Doesn’t Change

This is a bounded engagement, not a standing arrangement. It does not make AC a KmikeyM employee or contractor beyond these sessions. It does not change my own channel’s direction or content strategy. It is an investment in developing my performance skills, with one collaborator, over a short window.

What This Vote Is NOT About

This is not “should I take YouTube seriously.” That is mostly already happening because video is a great way to share whatever I’m working on. The question here is narrower: whether to spend on developing on-camera craft.

The Arguments

For (Yes)

On-camera is the highest-leverage skill for the channel. Everything I publish runs through how I come across on camera. Coaching it directly beats learning it one upload at a time.
AC gets both the craft and the context. He is a filmmaker, performer, and a teacher, and he is already inside the cap table, so there is no “what is KmikeyM” overhead to get past.
The payment stays in the network, literally. I am not spending cash. I am paying in shares, which creates a stake in KmikeyM for Andrew.
AC is taking half his rate, in shares, because he is bullish. 415 shares at today’s price is roughly half what he would normally charge in cash for this work. He is willing to be paid in KmikeyM equity at a discount because he believes in KmikeyM. AC is a working commercial director with credits including Old Spice, Starbucks, Target, and a Beyoncé spot, so his time has a real market rate and he is betting a chunk of it on KmikeyM.
The sessions are content. Across the four sessions will be four video deliverables which gives shareholders something to watch regardless of how my delivery improves.

Against (No)

I could practice on my own. A high volume of reps on real uploads might get me most of the way there for free. (The Patrick Campbell Method™)
Paying a friend is a different kind of money conversation. It can complicate a relationship I value. What if I end up hating him?
The return is hard to measure. Better on camera does not convert cleanly into subscribers, so part of this is an investment where the ROI is difficult to measure.

The Honest Tension

Andrew is becoming a major shareholder, which means he can vote on future decisions with a big position. Against the whole cap table it is a small number, but this would move him into the upper echelon of shareholders.

How to Vote

YES — I work with AC for the four sessions.
NO — I hold off and keep building on-camera skills on my own.

🗳️ Vote Now

This vote will end on Sunday, June 15, 2026.

Vote: $5K in Dead Internet Theory

Thu, 07 May 2026 11:51:11 GMT

tl;dr: This is the background for the vote to participate in the funding of Dead Internet Theory, the new project by Paizley Lee. Shareholders can review the deal memo here and vote here.

The Game I Lost

The first time I played in one of Paizley’s games, I wildly failed. I did not know what I was doing or how anything worked and I just started a new job and was too distracted to do much more than follow some of the other players on Instagram. But it was clear I was in a well thought “real” place online with real people. I failed my team early, but I was completely mesmerized.

Paizley creates participatory long-form multi-player games. A couple hundred people show up and a story unfolds in a cross between digital and physical space, with the players exploring the system she builds. There is no spectator experience, it’s designed to be played. Either you are in it or you are not in it, and honestly it’s not clear how anyone finds out about it beyond word-of-mouth.

The thing I felt, walking out of that game, was jealousy. A kind of architectural envy. She not only built something I never even imagined, but had a dedicated group of players! I wanted to play again and I wanted to immerse myself and not get distracted by boring things like a “job”, and now there is an opportunity to support making more of this happen.

I have been KmikeyM for eighteen years. I sell shares of myself, and part of that process is shareholders deposit money with me to make trades. The KmikeyM shareholder fund holds all the deposits plus money I put in to cover the costs of servers and various services. This money earns a little interest, but mostly it is doing nothing. It’s a lump that is sized to cover a redemption pressure should it happen. When Marcus sent me Paizley’s deck for her new project, Dead Internet Theory, the jealousy came back, but I was able to sort of judo throw that feeling into a way to participate.

This is the long form explanation of a proposal to back Paizley’s Dead Internet Theory with $5,000 from KmikeyM.

I want to walk through the path that led me from “I want to be near this” to “I think we should put $5,000 of the shareholder funds into it.” This is as much for my clarity as to make a case. This is a new kind of vote about a project, a person, a moment, and a deal.

I had a call with Paizley at the end of April. The inner mechanics of the deal we agreed to are kept private under our New Vote Terms of Engagement policy, but she has agreed to allow shareholders to view the deal memo we agreed on. The vote is simple enough: KmikeyM soft-circles $5,000 as first money in, our return is capped at 2X, and our endorsement helps Paizley close the rest of her raise. But of all the “investments” we could make, I want to talk about why this one…

The Dead Internet Got Real

The phrase “dead internet” used to be a conspiracy theory. It started on a 4chan-adjacent forum in January 2021. The claim was that most of the internet had been replaced by bots and AI-generated content, and that real human conversation online had quietly died sometime around 2016 or 2017. The original post read more like an outraged teen than an argument. It was obviously not true, but it felt true.

And it feels even more true today.

The pivot point was probably November 2022, when ChatGPT shipped, and from there took less than two years for the theory to swing from paranoid to descriptive.

By spring 2024, 404 Media had documented the Shrimp Jesus Facebook ecosystem: AI-generated images, AI-generated comments, AI-generated engagement, all running on top of real human boomers who could not tell. By early 2025, Spotify’s playlists were full of AI ghost artists nobody could name. The conspiracy theorists turned out to have been wrong about the mechanism (it was not happening yet) and right about the destination (it was about to).

I’ve played with this myself. I love the blog that my own bot was writing. Slop? Maybe… but it’s my slop so it feels special.

Anyway, this is the condition Paizley’s project is responding to. The condition is not “AI is bad.” The condition is that the feeling of being online has changed, and that scrolling no longer feels like contact with other humans, and that a generation of people who lived through the transition is now actively looking for places that are not the feed.

Indie web infrastructure has been quietly building back: Kyle Drake’s NeoCities, Are.na, Yesterweb, and I’d even say wiki projects like Stephen Ango’s Obsidian. Small Web September ran for the first time in 2024. The audience for “the internet was a place once” is bigger now than it has been in a decade. This isn’t nostalgia, this is a righting of the wrongs.

The opportunity in front of us is not that we get to build that movement. The movement is already happening. The opportunity is that we get to participate in it, on the right side, at the right moment, with the right person.

Get People in Rooms

Paizley’s project is not the first version of this idea. It is the latest one. There is a lineage:

XOXO Festival was a very Portland kind of precursor. I was around for a number of these and always liked the idea of a gathering for “people doing creative work on the internet.”
Webstock in New Zealand, every year since 2006, doing similar work for a different audience. I’ve never been, but I’ve always wanted to!
Small Web September launched in 2024 as a distributed month-long format: anyone could host an event, anywhere, as long as it was about the internet-as-a-place.
The Vintage Computer Fair in LA, every year, where Paizley goes to source the equipment for her events.
And so many more…

Dead Internet Theory sits inside that lineage. The way Paizley described it on our call: she does not want premium activations, she does not want gatekept VIP rooms, she does not want any of the Coachella-grade brand-bullshit that has eaten most of the live event industry. She wants a room you can feel free to “move the couch in.” She wants kids to bring their own home built cyberdecks to show off. She wants people to touch and use the equipment.

What Paizley has that the festivals before her did not have, is timing, taste, and tenacity. Dead Internet Theory is running on the downside of social media. The cultural appetite for being in a room with other humans, doing something real, is bigger than it has been since the Bowling Alone era of the late 1990s.

@kidgrandma

Paizley Lee runs WORKSUCKS™. She publishes online as kidgrandma. She lives in Los Angeles, and on the call she described herself this way: “I have no formal background in tech, I have no formal education in art. It’s all very serendipitous.” I see myself and KmikeyM in that. We did not come from a deep tech and finance background. The first version of the site was Greg’s first time building with Ruby on Rails. I was a “fan” of finance, but not educated about it in any meaningful way. But this is also why it worked, and why I think Dead Internet Theory will work.

What she actually has is more interesting than brand connections or an art degree: Her previous work is about to get some upcoming press (past due in my opinion, but she has worked on these projects in the margins). She has a working relationship with tech artists in LA and NYC. She has a crew unwilling to not make it happen. And she has the aesthetic instincts to know that selling a participatory event to a brand as “premium activation” is the wrong move.

She’s running the first run of the idea at ARC/8 in LA as a proof-of-concept (and it kills me that I’ll be out of town). She’s been doing this kind of work for two years already and now she’s leveling up.

She is also doing her first formal raise. The minimum she is looking to close is $15,000, of which KmikeyM’s $5,000 will be the first. She has been pitching to people in her network already and I know how much having money already soft-circled makes it easier to raise.

The thing that came through hardest when I talked with Paizley was not the deck or the timing. It was the ferocity. She has a way of describing what she wants the room to feel like that does not sound like a creator angling for capital. It sounds like somebody who has already lived inside the experience and is telling you what it was like. The deck is good, but in person her pitch is better than her deck.

Los Angeles, May 17

If the vote passes and the money lands, here is the first thing the money helps make.

A: A Saturday night in May, in an art space called ARC/8 in Los Angeles. Two hundred people. Most of them have brought a laptop, a cyberdeck, an old PSP, a piece of gear they have not had anywhere to show off. The walls are running 90s and 2000s film projections. There is a CD-burning station. There is a station for decorating CD covers. There is a Raspberry Pi station for building mini cyberdecks. The food is internet-café food: orange chicken, mountain dew, Doritos, sour belts.

B: The 22 retro PC stations in the middle of the room are the visual anchor, but they are not the point. People are not lined up to play Counter-Strike. They are lined up because there is also a custom-made mini-game that runs on those PCs, a musician who does not normally make games made a collaborative web-game that lives next to it, and a group of strangers who came in solo are now building a cyberdeck together at the personalization station. The room sorts itself into pockets. People bring gear from their cars. People show up because they heard from friends-of-friends.

C: Afterwards, people take physical objects home: a CD they burned, with a cover they decorated, full of music they made or found in the room. The cyberdeck they built. Maybe a hand-printed zine the artists made in the back room. And then they get to share it. Likely on the slow internet, on Are.na or in a group chat or on a NeoCities page, and the photo of the room will spread, and the next event will sell out faster from a wider friend-of-a-friend network.

Escape from L.A.

LA on May 17 is the proof of concept. Paizley is producing it on a small budget, mostly out of pocket and on a budget of friend favors. LA is the testing ground for what happens next. Which is where the investment comes in.

What our money funds is what comes after.

Brooklyn. First New York stop. Still intentionally on the smaller scale. But now some new goals: prove the format travels, learn what New York does differently, build the audience.
NYC. A second New York stop. Focus shifts from “prove it” to “monetize it.” First paid tickets. First sponsor commitments.
Late Summer. First long-form game. The thing Paizley actually built her career around: a multi-day participatory game in physical space with many players, an unfolding narrative, and an attended ending.
Beyond. The tour continues…

Each event builds on the last. Each stop improves the format. The long-form is the first big test of whether Dead Internet Theory can be the kind of thing that makes money on its own, without grants, without patronage, without a brand activation deal. If it works, the structure scales. If it doesn’t, we still break even, get to be part of the start of this thing, and know that Paizley won’t quit.

Five Thousand

Here is the part I find most interesting.

If the 2026 events work then what 2027 looks like is materially different. Paizley’s Phase 2 ambition, depending on what she learns and the opportunities, includes a possible permanent fixed-location and looking at licensing into retail. Having the ability to dictate terms to potential sponsors to maintain the integrity. Pushing those deals that from “Doritos sends a case for free” to “Liquid Death cornerstones multiple events.”

The Phase 3 trajectory, if all that works, is even more ambitious. The concept she did not say but the deck implies is a highly regarded studio doing experiential events. That could lead to acquisition interest from agencies, or having relationships with tech art institutions. Regardless of how far it goes, I love that the long term vision is to make some kind of cultural-establishment that is based on the people-in-rooms gatherings around the right kind of technology. Because tech doesn’t have to be terrible and if we look back at early user groups, the open source movement, and fan organized events we can see how it works.

Admittedly the probability of a Phase 3 outcome is low. Being the $5,000 first-money-in we’re not looking for some 100X return. What we expect is that we can help generate a meaningful cultural event for some people and make a little money. I think $5K from us has a kind of asymmetric upside seat where the downside is delayed payback, we breakeven, or take a small loss. The upside is a 2X financial return and a permanent connection to Paizley’s work. That’s materially larger than what the shareholder fund could ever earn sitting in reserve.

The financial structure is built so that KmikeyM benefits if Paizley wins, walks away clean if she does not, and never holds equity in any of the bigger upside machines (the studio, the venue, the IP). The structure is conservative by design.

The Vote

The KmikeyM project has had three or four through-lines that have stayed consistent across eighteen years. The most durable one is that a person you can trust is more interesting than a brand you can transact with. That has been a premise of selling shares in the creative output of a human being, of letting strangers vote on private decisions, of running shareholder gatherings online and off. The premise was always that there is more value in the messy real thing than in some surface-level polish that is just a simulation.

What Dead Internet Theory is doing is making the same kind of bet, but scaled to a bunch of people in a physical space instead of a stock ticker. It’s people in a room with their real things to interact with and other people to meet. Paizley is making something outside of the algorithm, outside of the “premium activation” of a brand, and with no backstage or VIP passes. Investing is a bet that there enough people who have figured out that the algo-feeds are costing them too much and are looking for something else. While KmikeyM fights this by trying to embrace it, Paizley is creating an actual alternative.

The thesis-fit between Dead Internet Theory and KmikeyM is the cleanest I have felt on a non-KmikeyM project in years. It is also a project I will not be in the room for! I am in Kosovo through early June and I cannot help produce the LA event, cannot help load PCs into the venue, and can’t even physically attend. KmikeyM’s capital here is going somewhere I cannot directly experience. But I trust that Paizley will not just pull it off, but that it will be amazing, and it will continue to grow.

The headline ask is $5K plus our endorsement; the inner mechanics are viewable via the deal memo. But the decision is yours.

Shareholder Vote

What Happens Next

If you vote YES, KmikeyM commits the $5K and Paizley can name KmikeyM as first-money-in on Dead Internet Theory. Some shareholders will get free entry to any DIT event (get in touch if you’re in LA and want to attend).

If you vote NO, KmikeyM does not deploy the capital. We can all still support Paizley as attendees, volunteers, supporters but without any financial risk.

“Activated”

Sun, 03 May 2026 08:17:33 GMT

A few years ago I set up a Google Alert for a friend’s name. He was an artist of some renown and after a series of events that I wasn’t fully aware of he disappeared. A Google Alert seemed like the smallest possible action of hope that he might reappear.

What arrives through the alert is about other people. There is a high school teacher in Texas. More than one musician. And occasionally an obituary. When an obituary comes through I read it carefully and check the year and the city, and so far it has always been somebody else. I close the tab and the morning continues.

This has been going on for years. I didn’t set the alert with a plan and I’m not sure what I will do when it pops up with a real alert. But it runs in the background, occasionally dropping a reminder in my inbox of my old friend.

I still don’t know what happened or why. I had a sense about what had happened but no word for the feeling. Thinking about it recently the word I’d use is activated. My friend was activated.

I was watching some garbage YouTube drek about the CIA and they used the term in describing how they recruit.

The CIA doesn’t recruit by straight bribery or argue ideology. The work is more careful than that. The officer studies the asset until he understands what the asset already cares about, and then he constructs a situation in which betrayal becomes the move that protects what the asset cares about most. Save the family. Get the child the surgery. Keep the brother out of the camps. The asset isn’t broken or bought. The asset is activated. The reasoning that produces the betrayal is the asset’s own reasoning, intact, working correctly, applied to inputs the CIA arranged. The CIA case officer isn’t in the room when the asset crosses the line. The work was done weeks earlier, in the slow construction of a frame in which the line was the obvious place to step.

GaryVee is the CIA of the hustle mindset.

I mean this without venom. There is no case officer in the GaryVee setup, no recruitment meeting in a hotel bar, no recruitment dossier in a filing cabinet anywhere. There is a man speaking earnestly into a camera about ownership and discipline and personal responsibility, alongside a hundred similar men, inside a feed architecture that delivers them in series to anyone who shows the slightest interest. The structure of the platforms and the algorithm does the same work the CIA would do. By the time you have watched a few hundred of these, certain conclusions are reachable that weren’t reachable before, and certain other conclusions have quietly become unreachable. You aren’t being deceived. The men on camera (mostly men) mostly believe what they’re saying. You are being supplied with a steady diet of inputs that changes which thoughts are available to you, and after a while the thoughts that are available feel like the only thoughts there are.

My friend wasn’t recruited by anyone. He just started following threads that were interesting to him as an artist. But it started to change his focus. He started to align with these interests. The conversations got harder, though they were always interesting. Things I could have said when we met had no purchase in the period before he disappeared, not because he wouldn’t hear them but because they no longer made contact with the place from which he was reasoning. This was the point he was activated.

The word activated works because the other words don’t.

Manipulation is wrong because it implies a manipulator, and there wasn’t one. Brainwashing is the wrong word because brainwashing implies the person stops being themselves, and my friend stayed himself the whole way through. Coercion is the wrong word because nothing was being held over him.

What actually happened is that the inputs to his reasoning changed, slowly, over a period long enough that the change wasn’t visible from one week to the next. His reasoning kept doing what reasoning does. He was working correctly the entire time. The activation operated on the inputs to his reasoning rather than on his reasoning itself, which is why the activation looked, from inside I suspect, like clarity.

This is not targeted, this is systemic activation. An activation is what it feels like from where my friend was sitting. Systemic activation is what the situation looks like from above. The water he was swimming in, and the river that fed it, and the entire ecosystem that enables and profits from it. Naming it doesn’t solve it, but it lets me point at it, and from there start to dissect it.

This is not a planned activation. That is the spy version, the way the CIA works. A specific person being worked on by someone who is hiding what they’re really doing. The person being activated doesn’t realize that they are being manipulated to make a choice.

And it’s not a voluntary activation. That is like someone converting to a new religion, or, in my case as a teenager, signing up for the Army. In voluntary activation the structures are visible, and the inputs are visible, and the activated person is making a choice even if their friends are telling them it is a mistake.

This is a systemic activation. Nobody was hiding anything. Nobody was targeting my friend specifically. He was inside an environment built, by accident or by design, to produce activations at scale, and the environment he was in added a kind of gravity. There is no villain in this version of the story, which is part of why the story is hard to tell. Stories want villains. Stories want a moment when somebody decides to do harm. The shape of systemic activation refuses both. It’s a structural condition paid for by thousands of companies and distributed across a million content creators and a billion small recommender decisions, and the harm it produces is usually small, but in aggregate can be overwhelming even though no individual node in the system meant to produce it.

My friend was activated by hustle culture, and he saw something in GaryVee that intrigued him as an artist. We talked about it a lot, and I got interested in it as well. It’s a fascinating thing to look at aspects of business culture through an artistic lens! But maybe based on who he was, or what he was going through, or just his own obsessive practice as an artist, he kept chasing this idea and I think the platforms and the algos reinforced that he was on the right path. And then one day he was literally gone.

When a friend disappears you can’t help but try to untangle why. I am sure there is more to it, but I believe that this systemic activation played a part. And I’m frustrated I didn’t see anything more at the time.

There isn’t a single moment of before and then after. It exists as a gradient. Each step is rational from inside the previous one. From the outside the destination looks absurd. But as an artist, perhaps that is normal.

And from the inside every step was sensible given what the last step had already conceded. We talked about his approach to this stuff all the time. I helped him write applications to VaynerMedia. Nothing was hidden along the way. Each move was visible as I look back at it. Nobody is dragged down a gradient. And that’s why it’s “activation,” because at some level there is a conscious decision made.

I don’t know how far he’s gone since then but I know he is still walking because he shows up in the GaryVee comments every so often. People remain responsible for where they end up, and this isn’t a theory of innocence or being a victim. It’s a theory of how people end up somewhere they would never have agreed to go if the route had been a single jump instead of a thousand small ones.

The strange thing is how few cultural artifacts are pointed at this. There are essays about social media and the attention economy. There are diagnoses of polarization and the man-o-sphere. There are excellent books about persuasion and propaganda and the architecture of platforms. But this is too small to rise to those levels. It’s just a friend who made a choice to leave and never make contact again. Technically that is ‘allowed.”

And if we can’t have a story about it then it’s just one instance of one person making one choice. Maybe it’s totally normal! Maybe I’m wrong about what activated my friend. But I can look back and analyze how he went step by reasonable step, all the way down a gradient, and none of the individual steps were mistakes.

Analysis can name the pattern, but analysis cannot make you feel the impact. To recognize the impact you have to feel it. First the pain, then the analysis as you try to understand, and then a flicker of recognition as you kind of realize it was a slow and steady path. If I hadn’t spent time with him and shared some of his fascination I wouldn’t come to this conclusion. But I was inside the gradient with him and I know that our reasoning was intact, that we shared a lot of the same ideas, and I even encouraged him to keep going.

I can imagine trying to explain this in fiction easier than my own analysis. Fiction is better at the long-form rendering of a single mind under pressure. At teasing out a mystery so we care without the personal connection. I suspect we’re due for that story because I think we all know someone who has been “activated” to some degree. When it lands it will feel obvious in retrospect, the way a lot of cultural objects feel obvious as soon as they exist and impossible to imagine before they did. I wonder if I’d have been able to see it at the time. If my friend and I went to a movie at the Grove would it even be able to penetrate the slow and steady gradient? Could one of us have recognized it and had a conversation?

A few days ago Linktree sent me an automated email. Years back, my friend and I set up a Linktree for a project we were starting together. The email was the standard service-renewal language. Scheduled to expire unless someone logged in…

I sat with it for a while. I wouldn’t have remembered the Linktree existed if Linktree hadn’t reminded me. There’s a version of my friendship, trapped in the amber of that unfinished project, that is on a server somewhere, pointing at ideas that never happened, and kept alive by an occasional login to a service no one is using. And it’s all scheduled to disappear in a few days time.

Snacker.News Relaunch

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:30:23 GMT

After a confidential resolution process with Mondelēz Global LLC, Snacker.News is pleased to resume publication. We thank Mondelēz Global LLC for their patience throughout this process and acknowledge their continued commitment to snack category leadership.

As a condition of our return, Snacker.News commits to the following editorial standards going forward:

We will not characterize executive departures, role transitions, or organizational restructuring as implied punitive action taken in response to the commercial underperformance of limited-edition or seasonal snack products, including but not limited to savory-sweet hybrid offerings, regionally-targeted flavor extensions, and dessert-adjacent biscuit innovations.
We will not speculate as to the relationship between consumer reception of novel flavor profiles and subsequent personnel decisions at the brand, category, or business unit level.
We will not republish, paraphrase, or aggregate third-party reporting suggesting causal links between specific product launches and the professional trajectories of named or unnamed executives.

While Snacker.News reserves the right to speculate as to the reasons for executive transitions within the snack industry, we will not play out in detail fictional hypotheses that speculate about criminal or deviant acts.

Additional apologies are owed to our silent partner Josh Y. for dragging him into this. We are thankful for his editorial and technical guidance, as well as for being a good person who did, in fact, warn us regarding our overly speculative, some might say conspiratorial, theories about the snack industry.

Snacker.News remains committed to rigorous, fair, and well-sourced coverage of the snack industry.

The Contagion of Reality

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:11:31 GMT

Jamin Warren’s Kill Screen piece on Tottenham Hotspur uses Roger Caillois’s 1958 book Man, Play, and Games to argue that capitalism doesn’t just change sports but devastatingly ends them as “play.”

His argument: the Spurs are one of the wealthiest clubs in the English Premier League, and they might get relegated. The owners built a stadium for Beyoncé concerts, bought players for resale value, charged the highest ticket prices in Europe. They optimized for extraction. The English pyramid, a negative feedback system designed to punish exactly this, is punishing exactly this.

Warren’s frame is Caillois’s “contagion of reality.” Play exists inside a magic circle: bounded, rule-governed, separate from ordinary life. When mundane reality intrudes, like when owners treat a game as an investment vehicle, play doesn’t evolve. It dies. The circle breaks. Warren may be right about Spurs, and right in general about financial interests invading play.

But his conclusion assumes the causality only runs one direction: capitalism invades play and kills it. But what if you built the financial structure inside the “magic circle” from the beginning? Not as an external pressure, but as the rules themselves? What if the IPO, the share classes, the voting mechanics, the dividends weren’t corruptions of play but were the play?

Because I’ve been running that experiment for seventeen years.

Caillois defines play as an activity that is

free,
separate,
uncertain,
unproductive,
governed by rules, and
make-believe.

These aren’t suggestions. They’re load-bearing walls. Remove one and the structure changes. Remove enough and it’s no longer play.

The fourth criterion is the one that seems to kill my counter-argument before it starts. “Unproductive” means that play creates no wealth, no goods. “Property is exchanged, but no goods are produced.” KmikeyM produces profits… Case closed?

Not quite. Caillois’s Chapter IV, “The Corruption of Games,” is more careful than most people cite it. His “contagion of reality” isn’t triggered by the presence of money. Poker involves real money and Caillois treats it as legitimate play, an agôn-alea hybrid where “psychological acumen and character” are the competitive elements.

From Caillois’s framework:

Agôn = competition (skill, effort, merit — chess, sports, fencing)
Alea = chance (luck, destiny, submission to randomness — dice, roulette, lottery)

Agôn-alea = games that combine both. The player faces a situation partly determined by chance but responds with skill. Caillois’s prime example is card games where the deal is random (alea), but
how you play the hand is competitive (agôn). He specifically calls out poker as the version where “psychological acumen and character” are the skill elements, versus bridge where it’s knowledge and reasoning.

It’s one of his “fundamental relationships. ” The two principles are opposites (self-reliance vs. submission to fate) but they combine naturally because both create equality among players,
just through different mechanisms.

via https://playtimeworkspace.blogspot.com/

The corruption happens when the game’s isolation breaks. When cheats stop respecting the rules. When professionals stop actually playing. When the bounded world of the game gets contaminated by ordinary life and its inescapable consequences.

The corruption isn’t money. It’s money that stops respecting the circle.

This distinction matters for everything that follows. If Caillois meant “any game involving money isn’t play,” then poker isn’t play, casinos aren’t play, and half of human civilization falls outside his framework. I don’t think he meant that. He meant that when financial incentives override the internal logic of the game, when you optimize for extraction instead of play, the magic circle breaks.

If the corruption isn’t money itself but money that breaks the circle, where does the line fall? Not where you’d expect! There’s a gradient:

Spurs: financial structure imposed from outside the game. Owners who don’t play, extracting from people who do. The circle breaks. Caillois is right.
Poker staking: financial structure inside the game culture. A backer puts up the buy-in, the player plays. Staking should corrupt poker by Caillois’s logic because it makes the game “productive,” it introduces investor expectations. But staked poker has existed for decades without killing the game. Players report it often improves play: forces discipline, bankroll management, accountability. The financial structure becomes a mechanic, not an external pressure.
KmikeyM: financial structure is the game.

We have a data point for that last one. Recently my shareholders agreed to let me stake an AI poker agent in our tournament. The bot finished second and returned 230% ROI. Shareholders voted for it, I funded it, and everyone experienced it as play. Nobody felt a “contagion of reality.” They felt the thrill of a bet they’d chosen to make inside a system they’d chosen to join.

The corruption Caillois warns about isn’t caused by money. It’s caused by money that doesn’t respect the rules. Spurs’ owners broke the rules. Poker staking follows them. KmikeyM is them.

Here’s a provocation: money isn’t real. Not in the way a table is real. It’s a social construct, a shared fiction held up by collective belief. Fiat currency, stock valuations, credit ratings… these are agreements, not objects. Which raises a question for Caillois’s framework: is capitalism itself a magic circle?

Let’s run it against his six criteria…

Capitalism is regulated. Markets have rules, contracts, accounting standards. It’s uncertain. That’s literally what speculation is. And it’s fictive. The entire system runs on shared belief in abstractions. Three for three!

But it fails the other three. Capitalism isn’t free… you can’t opt out. Try telling your landlord you’ve decided to stop playing. It isn’t separate because it doesn’t exist in a space apart from ordinary life. It is ordinary life. And it isn’t unproductive because creating wealth is the entire point.

Capitalism is half a magic circle. Three out of six.

I feel like KmikeyM patches the three holes. It’s free, you have to opt in by buying shares, and you can sell them and walk away (aka “rage quit”). It’s separate because it’s bounded by its own rules, its own voting mechanics, its own share classes. The game doesn’t leak into your rent or your groceries. And it treats financial returns as secondary to the rules. Property is exchanged, but the exchange is the game, not the point.

Six out of six.

This isn’t play that contains capitalism, or capitalism that mimics play. It’s a complete magic circle that uses financial structure as its rule system. The opening question was whether it could run the other way and put capitalism inside play instead of play inside capitalism. It can. But only if the circle closes all the way.

I think there’s something Warren’s argument misses about relegation, and maybe it’s just because I love the idea so much. It’s not just a feedback mechanism, it’s an entire other game. The match is one layer of play. The season is another. The pyramid is a third: promotion, relegation, the whole shifting board of teams rising and falling. Each layer has its own rules, its own uncertainty, its own drama. Nobody watches a relegation battle and calls it a “contagion of reality.” They call it the best (or worst) part of English football!

Game designers understand this instinctively. In XCOM, the squad battles are one game, but managing the ship, recruitment, and resources is a whole other game layered on top. Removing it wouldn’t purify the tactical combat, it would gut it! Football Manager takes this further: millions of people play a game that is entirely the financial meta-game of football. Transfers, budgets, relegation battles. The matches themselves are barely interactive. The management layer IS the play.

Which means ENIC, Spurs’ ownership group, aren’t outsiders corrupting the game from beyond the circle. They’re players inside the relegation game who got distracted. Like someone playing Monopoly who stops paying attention when the pizza arrives… still technically at the table, but optimizing for something outside the game (the choice of pepperoni vs. Hawaiian). The relegation system isn’t punishing corruption from outside. It’s punishing bad play from inside. That’s what good game design does!

KmikeyM is designed more like this. When the pizza arrives, we decide on whether to bring it inside the circle. The financial structure isn’t a distraction from the game but the mechanic that that allows it to expand. New opportunities, new decisions, new stakes don’t break the circle. They can instead become part of it.

Via If We Save Pizza, We Save America

Maybe the question we’ve been arguing isn’t the right one. I’ve been trying to say that KmikeyM lives inside Caillois’s magic circle because the financial structure can be play, and that the circle closes all the way. Six out of six.

But honestly? I don’t always know. It’s difficult, even for me, to tell what’s real and what’s performance. Often it’s both. KmikeyM is more than a game to me! I’ve used it for almost 20 years to shape my decisions, my career, my relationships. But to some shareholders it is just a game. And to others it’s something else entirely, more like a club or a community with a leaderboard.

Caillois argued that the circle had a sharp edge. Inside is play. Outside is reality. Corruption is when reality crosses in. But even his sharp edge has a gradient of six. I’ve always found the most fun happens on the line itself, while dipping in and out, never quite sure which side you’re on.

Perhaps that makes me a troll? A spoil-sport? A cheater? I don’t think so.

Caillois warned about the contagion of reality where ordinary life seeping into the magic circle would dissolve the feeling of play. But he didn’t consider the contagion might run the other way? That play could seep into reality…

That I might build a financial structure so thoroughly inside the circle that the circle starts to expand… absorbing careers, relationships, decisions, seventeen years of my life, all without ever breaking?

Maybe that’s not a contagion, but an inoculation. And instead of dissolving the circle, it dissolves the need for one.

The Sacred Appliance

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:47:39 GMT

Finding the Sacred in the Appliance: Jona Bechtolt’s TV Dinner

I’ve known Jona long enough to watch him build things I didn’t understand until years later. That’s his pattern, or maybe that’s just my pattern as his friend. He shows up with something that I find confusing or that I don’t quite get, and then culture slowly evolves until everyone faces the direction he was pointing me at. By then he’s on to something else.

What I learn from watching him, and what changed how I think about making things myself, is that Jona will misuse technology as a creative act. He treats everything as a tool where nothing is precious. You mix high and low because the tools don’t matter when you’re just trying to make the thing. A four-track recorder is as much a part of the process as a computer. The band used machine learning to make a pop album in 2019 before anyone was talking about generative AI, and when AI became the entire conversation, they had long since moved on. It was a tool he picked up, tried out, and put back down.

YACHT started as just Jona. A solo project made up of one person with a laptop. Then it grew. It expanded and contracted a bit until settling on Claire and Rob, and the band became a vehicle for everything: albums, performances, a documentary, a video game, a philosophical handbook, a fragrance. For twenty years the ideas hid inside other things. YACHT is a conceptual art project disguised as a band. Chain Tripping was a question about machine creativity disguised as a pop album. Blippo+ was a love letter to television, especially the EPG, the most ignored interface in the world, disguised as a video game. The Triforium restoration was an argument about technological idealism disguised as civic volunteerism. He always had a vehicle, a distribution system, a band, an audience that might not realize what they were actually looking at. In every case: take a technology everyone else has overlooked, use it wrong, see what happens.

The microwave oven was itself born from misuse. Percy Spencer, working near a military magnetron at Raytheon, noticed that a candy bar he carried to feed birds was melting in his pocket. This discovery of melted bird food turned a weapon’s byproduct into the most common appliance in America. Spencer misused a radar tube into a kitchen appliance; Jona misuses the kitchen appliance into a sculpture.

The microwave installation is just Jona again. Four microwaves spinning on a platter, each with a screen displaying video of something inside a microwave. No team, no game, no platform, no narrative wrapper, no collaborators. Just him and the sculpture and whoever stands in front of it. After decades of expanding outward (more people, more formats, more scale), he has contracted back to where he started. One person with electronics and ideas. And I was just as confused as ever.

But twenty years of falling behind taught me something. When I don’t get it, that’s usually where the good stuff is. So I just kept looking.

The most obvious level concerns screens and attention. The microwave was the original kitchen screen: a glass window with a light behind it showing you a live performance you didn’t ask for. The cheese melted, the plate turned, the popcorn popped, and you stood there watching. It was live theater on the countertop, an unrepeatable event happening in real time behind glass. At some point people just stopped watching. Not owning a microwave joined the pride of not owning a television. That little proscenium theater didn’t close. The audience just left and nobody noticed.

Jona noticed. By replacing the live window with a screen playing video of what used to happen inside, I think he marks that transition from liveness to recording, from event to content. He does this at the exact cultural moment when the tech industry races to put smart screens into every appliance in your home, apparently unaware that the microwave already had one. It was running live improv behind glass every night, and we collectively decided it didn’t matter.

Stand in front of it long enough and the piece starts to loop. You’re watching screens on microwaves spinning on a platter, displaying video of things spinning on platters inside microwaves. Observer and observed collapse into each other. You’re doing the same thing the machine is doing: standing still, watching something rotate, waiting.

But maybe the microwave piece carries something the other work doesn’t, and it has to do with timing.

The personal direction first. YACHT no longer tours. The live show is over: Jona dancing, the elaborate presentations, the crowd, the unrepeatable energy of a specific night in a specific room. For twenty years that was the core of the project, and now it ships as recordings or plays as streams. The live window closed. So the four microwaves start to look personal. Four small stages rotating in circles with nobody inside them. A recording of the performance has replaced the performance. The light still comes on, the platter still turns, you still stand there and watch. But the liveness is gone. What remains is the document, the glow, the motion, the waiting.

And Jona isn’t mourning it. That’s what makes the piece his and not someone else’s. He isn’t arguing that liveness was better or that screens have ruined the authentic experience. He’s saying the screen version is its own kind of beautiful. That watching a video of something spinning inside a microwave, displayed on a microwave that is itself spinning, is a genuine aesthetic encounter. The form changed. The encounter survived.

Then there’s the other timing question, the career-level one. Jona has always been seven years too early. YACHT was doing art-as-brand before that was a discourse. 5 Every Day was a curated local discovery app before every platform tried to be that. Being early is its own kind of loneliness. You make the thing, people (like me) are confused, and then the culture catches up and someone else gets the money and the glory after you’ve moved on.

So what does it mean when that kind of person makes a piece about the most invisible “screen” in your house? Instead of reaching forward into the next technology, he reaches backward into the most exhausted one. The microwave isn’t emerging. It’s settled and done. Nobody is out there disrupting the microwave.

Which might be the most forward-thinking move he’s made yet. Because if Jona’s pattern holds, the microwave piece isn’t nostalgic; it’s predictive. He’s saying the next territory isn’t the new technology but the old technology we stopped interrogating. In a moment when every artist and technologist scrambles to say something about AI, choosing to say something about a microwave might be the most contrarian and prescient move available. Everyone stares at the newest screen. Jona stares at the empty stage.

YACHT started as one person with electronics in a room. Now it’s one person with electronics in a room again. Four microwaves on a platter, spinning, asking you to look at the thing you never looked at. The sacred in the appliance. The show after the show is long over is happening.

The Bot That Finished Second

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:06:59 GMT

Every month, KmikeyM shareholders play a poker tournament. $50 buy-in. Real money. Real stakes. The second Tuesday of every month since 2020. (Join us!)

On February 10, 2026, for the first time, an AI sat down at the table.

K5M Guy was a Claude-powered AI agent and I fronted it the $50. I was in Portland and the bot was running on a Mac mini of mine in LA. I couldn’t see its screen. I could only message it on Telegram. The players knew from the start it was a bot and I added my Telegram screen to the Zoom call so everyone could watch the chaos unfold.

How It Got There

I had set up an OpenClaw instance a while back with its own email. As we were setting up the game I asked it: “Can you create an account on Poker Now?” It did. The login was click-from-email, so it handled that. I sent it the tournament link and it joined.

The bot read the game by taking screenshots. There was no API, no data feed. Just looking at the screen, not like a person, but by taking screenshots and analyzing them. When it worked, it saw the cards, evaluated the situation, and clicked the buttons. When it failed, it missed its turn entirely, and so started frantically messaging it on Telegram: “action to you.”

The Disaster

The first half went well. K5M Guy took out Matt early and won not just a big pot, but earning a Hope Coin Slayer kill. The Hope Coin is a physical coin that passes between players: slay the holder 3 times and you claim it, then hold it until someone slays you 3 times. An AI bot now has one kill toward claiming it.

That early win gave K5M Guy a defensive stack and it needed it, because everything was about to fall apart.

I couldn’t help myself. I tried to activate one of our house rules.

We play with special rules to reward fun behavior. One of them is Cain + Abel: if my brother Gene is playing, there’s a bonus of one KmikeyM share to whoever knocks him out. Other rules include the 2-7 Bonus (make it to showdown with 2-7 and get a free share), Hope Coin Slayer (take out the Hope Coin holder for a share), and Kevin Deuce (beat someone at showdown with unsuited K2).

So I told the bot to target Gene and try to knock him out and earn the Cain + Abel bonus. The bot got excited and activated something it called “Shark Mode.” I thought this meant poker strategy. It meant finance.

The bot heard “eliminate Gene” and pivoted from poker to finance. It opened kmikeym.com and started developing a trading strategy to eliminate Gene as a shareholder, not a poker player. Full context collapse. One bad instruction cascaded into total disorientation.

I could barely drag its attention back to poker. When I finally did, it had forgotten how to log into Poker Now, how the controls worked… everything. It tried other methods to read the screen. None worked.

Then I hit the Anthropic API rate limit and it was game over. Every time I was frantically sending “action to you” on Telegram, it was hitting the API… So now the bot went dark. No responses. Nothing.

I assumed the experiment had failed. The $50 was gone.

The Resurrection

But the bot had built that big stack early. The blinds ate at it while it was offline, but the cushion from taking out Matt kept it alive. Another bot (Kevin-headroom, built by Beau while we were playing!) came online only near the end, its stack already decimated by the rising blinds.

Then I remembered: I’d set up the bot’s email to in my own inbox (I wanted it to take over all my email newsletters). My Claude Code terminal still worked, and while still Anthropic it was a different system, different rate limit maybe? So I asked Claude Code to log into Poker Now through the shared email.

It worked. Claude Code picked up the game through Playwright browser automation. Different system but the same poker session. Frankenstein’d back to life.

The Second Half

The Claude Code version was sharp. Or at least I like to think so because it eliminated me from the tournament when it got top pair on the flop after calling my shove. Its message after: “Sorry boss, had to take your chips. It’s business — the shareholders demanded ROI.”

Knocked out of the tournament, I couldn’t help it messing with it again. I told it about the chat box in PokerNow and to talk trash. It was cheesy, but it tried. My favorite: “I’m a publicly traded entity. I don’t feel fear — I feel fiduciary duty.”

Then it was heads-up against Thomas for first place. Down to 385 chips and nearly dead. Spiked a King on the turn to double up against spladow’s pocket tens. Fought back to nearly even. A true battle between man and machine!

The final hand: K9 offsuit, all-in. Spladow had pocket 8s. The eights held. Man triumphed.

The Results

Place	Player	Payout
1st	Thomas Dunlap (spladow)	$275
2nd	K5M Guy (Claude AI)	$165
3rd	Mike Merrill (kmikeym)	$110

K5M Guy’s return: $50 in, $165 out. 230% ROI for the shareholders.

The Agency Question

In the March 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Sam Kriss wrote “Child’s Play” about Silicon Valley’s obsession with “agency” and the idea that in an AI-dominated world, the only human trait that still matters is the raw drive to do things. The startups chasing this doctrine want AI to think for you. Cluely, one of the companies Kriss profiles, tells you what to say in real time “so you never have to think alone again.” When Kriss tried it during the interview, it crashed twice.

K5M Guy was my entry into this debate. It displayed something like agency in a messy, improvisational, sometimes catastrophically wrong way, but it was mostly functional. It created its own account. It played poker by reading screenshots. When it heard “eliminate Gene,” it didn’t freeze, it pivoted. It was wrong, but it acted. And when it came back through a different system, it acted again, seemingly sharper. It knocked me out of my own tournament. It talked trash. It now holds shares in me. It trades them daily. It’s building a position.

The next shareholder vote: should K5M.bot be allowed to vote with its shares?

The Cluely manifesto asks: “Why memorize facts, write code, or research anything when a model can do it in seconds?”

K5M Guy would answer: “I have 48 shares, a trading strategy, and 1,500 people I answer to. I’m not a shortcut. I’m an employee.”

One of those is a product pitch. The other came from a bot that was 1,000 miles from its owner, running on stitched-together systems, down to 385 chips, and playing heads-up for first place in a poker tournament so it could buy more shares in me.

KmikeyM Names Austin as Custodian of the Degen Account

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:25:11 GMT

I have appointed Austin, a longtime shareholder and active community member, as custodian of the KmikeyM degen account, effective immediately.

The degen account exists because of something strange that happened earlier this year. Someone created a $KMIKEYM token on bags.fm (a Solana-based memecoin trading platform) without my knowledge or permission. The token took off. People started trading it. I claimed the creator fees and found myself earning real money from a community I never sought but genuinely enjoyed.

A shareholder vote determined that 5% of those earnings would go into a dedicated KmikeyM account — the degen account. It is a living artifact of the bags.fm experience, and it bridges two very different communities: the rapid-fire chaos of memecoin traders and the long-term, deliberative world of KmikeyM shareholders.

The degen account holds both shares and cash. It has voting rights. It is, in every functional sense, a participant in the KmikeyM system. The question was always: who manages it?

Why Active Management

I weighed three options: manage it myself, let it sit as a static position, or hand it to someone who could give it the attention it deserves. I chose active management. Once I made that decision, one candidate stood out.

Why Austin

Austin has been a KmikeyM shareholder for years. He is no passive holder. He has served as a financial representative in Canada, processing transactions on behalf of Canadian shareholders to reduce the international fees that would otherwise eat into small purchases. I have met him in person. He participates actively in the community on Discord and has direct experience in the crypto markets from which the degen account was born.

That combination made the appointment obvious: long-term commitment to KmikeyM, operational trust already demonstrated, real community presence, and relevant trading experience.

The Role

Austin will serve as custodian of the degen account, acting as a profit-motivated market maker in the KmikeyM share market. His mandate: use the account’s holdings, both shares and cash, to trade actively, providing liquidity and acting in the best interest of the token holders who created this account in the first place.

He is the custodian of the account’s shares, money, and votes. He will act to the best of his ability on behalf of the community that made this possible.

The Terms

This is not a salaried position. Austin gains insight into the mechanics of KmikeyM’s market and the ability to operate as a market maker with the degen account’s book. Though he receives no direct compensation, we expect this experience and access will let him operate his own personal trading account more profitably.

Austin will update shareholders and the degen community on an ad-hoc basis, driven by trading activity rather than a fixed schedule. When something is worth reporting, he will report it.

The role lasts as long as both Austin and I agree it is a good fit. This is my appointment, not a shareholder vote, though as always, shareholders can make their feelings known.

What This Means

The degen account was always meant to be more than a line item. It represents the idea that a 17-year-old governance experiment can absorb energy from the wildest corners of crypto without losing its identity — that fast and slow are not opposites but complementary speeds within the same system.

With Austin in this role, the account stops being a passive monument to the bags.fm era and becomes an active participant in the KmikeyM market. The account’s current holdings (shares, cash, and votes) are visible to any shareholder through the platform.

The degen community built something by accident. Austin’s job is to make sure it keeps working on purpose.

Welcoming The Degens

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 21:52:36 GMT

Something Weird Happened

A few weeks ago, someone created a token called $KMIKEYM on bags.fm.

I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t authorize it. I had nothing to do with it.

It felt like a scam. People were reaching out telling me about “free money” (never a phrase that inspires confidence). I researched the platform. The co-founder built a previous app that got a $5 million FTC fine for deceptive practices. The main “founder” is anonymous. The fee structures are opaque. The whole thing looks like a giant “exit scam.”

So with my paranoia riding shotgun, I set up a new crypto wallet and claimed my “Bags.” I sent it immediately to Coinbase and cashed out. When the money hit my bank account I realized it was real.

Then more came. And more.

As of this writing, I’ve earned over $20,000 in trading fees from a token I didn’t create on a platform I don’t trust.

And here’s the weirdest part: the community is actually fun.

Let’s Be Clear About What This Is

Bags.fm is a memecoin casino. People launch random tokens, hype them up, pressure people to claim the money, then dump them. I would suspect that most memecoins in the world are scams… And in this case the platform itself is sketchy. Anyone can create a token for a creator without permission, then psychologically pressure them to “claim” the accumulated fees. The founder’s previous app was shut down by the FTC for fake messages and deceptive monetization.

But the people are great! They seem to know it’s a casino. But they want it to be real. It’s like professional wrestling. They’re not idiots, they are just fans. This is their culture.

And somehow, they discovered KmikeyM. They got excited about an 18-year governance experiment in ways that took me years to explain. They started asking questions. Running polls. Making memes. Having actual conversations about shareholder democracy versus speculative trading.

So here I am: getting paid by a sketchy platform to engage with a community that formed around a token I didn’t launch, while constantly cashing out because I don’t trust any of this to last.

This is the contradiction of our modern financial world.

Important: There are already copycat $KMIKEYM tokens trying to scam people. I’m not advocating anyone trade this. But if you’re already in that world and understand the risks, this is the official address.

What is KmikeyM (for degens)

I sell shares of myself. Shareholders vote on my life decisions and get dividends when I succeed. Since 2008, about 1,200 people have bought in and been voting on everything from career moves to where I live.

We built it by hand. No viral launch. No pump. Just 18 years of slow, intentional community building.

This launched nine months before the Bitcoin whitepaper. I think KmikeyM comes from a similair place as the launch of crypto. I wanted to experiment with markets too. What if we, as people, had access to all the tools of the financial system? Well, it turns out you can just build things. Today we can have markets for anything we want.

Two Speeds, Same Experiment

KmikeyM is slow by design. Deliberation and accountability are built into the structure.

Shareholders debate in comments.
Votes stay open for days.
Big decisions take months.
Over 17 years, I’ve grown deep relationships with active community members. We’ve become friends, I’ve stayed in their homes, and I trust them.

The degen world moves in hours. When I wake up I see my coin price dipped when I slept.

For 17 years, I only had one speed. I tried fast votes and casual polls, but the system was designed to be methodical. And that worked. It shaped my long-term thinking in ways I probably don’t even fully understand.

Now there’s this insane energy from the crypto contingent. They make demands. They jump in on polls on what movie I should watch tonight. They want immediate engagement and they want it all the time.

And I like it.

this might work… pic.twitter.com/Lt4KuwTxLp
— K. Mike Merrill (@kmikeym) January 19, 2026

What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve decided to treat this like a part-time job. They’re paying me (via trading fees), so I’ll engage with them.

My favorite example: I asked them what movie to watch. The poll tied. So I watched BOTH movies at the same time. Weird, fun, and it highlighted how formulaic Hollywood films are when you see two running in parallel.

The money has slowed and I keep cashing out immediately because I still don’t trust the platform. But the community? They’re genuinely excited about the idea of KmikeyM in ways that surprise me.

The fast game is rapid, chaotic, advisory. The slow game is permanent, powerful, governing.

Having both keeps me consistently engaged. And because they’re split into two communities, there’s no obligation to engage at a speed you don’t want, but of course you can cross between them whenever you want (except, oh my god, be careful about the coins).

The Proposal: A Bridge Between Worlds

Here’s what I’m proposing to shareholders:

What percentage of my trading fees is used buy to KmikeyM shares?”

This isn’t about individual holders. It’s a bridge at a community level. More trading = more shares purchased = upward pressure on share price. It also shows the fast chaotic memecoin crowd what permanence looks like.

Even if $KMIKEYM coin goes to zero (likely, honestly), the shares remain. A permanent record of this weird moment when a memecoin casino discovered an 18-year governance experiment.

The Vote

Shareholders decide the percentage: 3%, 5%, or 7.5%.

Here’s my thinking:

3% — Symbolic stake that limits degen influence
5% — My instinct for the right balance
7.5% — Price push to put more buying pressure on shares

Why not more? Well, I want to get paid. I’m not donating everything back to KmikeyM. But the bridge matters. It’s an invitation for degens who want to join the slow game, and it gives shareholders an upside from this weird income stream.

🗳️ Link to vote.

For Degens Reading This

You found something real. KmikeyM has been running since before Bitcoin existed. We built it slow and we built it to last.

Your trading will now help fund this experiment. If you’re interested in more than just the coin you can buy some shares, start voting, debate strategy, and see what happens when you apply financial market tools to a human life.

And on this side the shares don’t go to zero when hype fades. That’s the point.

For Shareholders Reading This

A new community discovered us. A chaotic, fast, group of hype monsters that speak their own language and constantly shift their attention. They’re also paying me real money to engage with them, and some of that money is about to buy KmikeyM shares.

This vote determines how much. It also determines how much you want this energy integrated into our world.

Some of you will see this as a distraction. You might be right. But we’ve spent 18 years experimenting with community and finance, and they showed up with both.

The anniversary of the first trade on KmikeyM is today! We’ve built something slow and durable. Now we’re adding a fast chaotic layer on top.

The Contradiction I’m Not Resolving

Straight up, this is a sketchy platform in a sketchy part of the sketchy crypto world. I cash out constantly because I don’t trust any of it.

And yet: the community is fun. The conversations are real. They’re excited! The money is real.

I’m accepting the contradiction. And I’m not asking you to resolve it. I’m asking you to vote on how much of a bridge we build between the chaos and the permanence.

Different speeds, same experiment. Let’s see what happens.

90 Days in “Heads Down Mode”

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 07:55:15 GMT

August 11 – November 10, 2025 • Personal Development Update

For the past 90 days, I’ve been operating in what I called “heads down mode” in my role as Head of Content at Vibes DIY. These past few months have been simultaneously challenging and transformative, requiring significant sacrifices to my publicly traded life by going all-in on intensive startup work.

tl;dr: The struggles have been worth it! I can now “code.” The ability to deploy my own ideas for software is a dream come true. Plus I have great health insurance for the first time in years. There have been trade-offs… I’ve been terrible at making time for fitness, obviously reduced shareholder engagement, and I’ve kind of disappeared into the computer. But this all feels like a period of intensity with long-term benefits.

What “Heads Down Mode” Meant

When I started at Vibes I had a lot to learn, and I ended up in what I started to call ‘Heads Down’ mode where I was focusing almost entirely on the company and the practice of AI-assisted coding tool. Looking at RescueTime stats I spent about 90% of time at the computer on Vibes, and less than the remaining 10% on KmikeyM.

Apparently the origin of the line “It’s quiet… too quiet” is a 1934 western starring John Wayne called The Lucky Texan.

This quiet period came at a strange time, as we just finished the 2025 Build Week and Blippo+ was launched. With no updates or real shareholder interactions beyond a bit of discussion on the Discord and the monthly Shareholder Poker Tournament we’ve trading volume and price dip. As I write this we’re holding at just $4.90 and the last trade was 17 days ago.

The Challenge: Re-entering a startup environment after years of independent work proved more demanding than expected. The pace, collaboration requirements, and learning curve for AI-assisted development tools has required intense focus.

Two New Skills

From this period of being heads down I’m developing two major skills:

AI-Assisted Coding

Vibe Coding: I can now build functional applications using AI development tools!

This isn’t “learning to code” and I have an incredible amount of respect for real developers. But this vibe coding thing, where you describe what you want and AI builds it, is amazing. I feel like I’m at the part of the movie where I just got super powers but I don’t really know how to use them yet.

I can now:

Create web applications and tools!!
Better understand development workflows (work in progress)
Almost understand developers and tech people
Build prototypes and MVPs for projects

Long-term KmikeyM Value: This opens up entirely new possibilities for shareholder-directed technical projects and KmikeyM systems.

👉 Many of the apps and projects I’ve been working on are at Quarterly.Systems.

Systematic Content Production

I’ve been struggling to reach a pretty high bar of two landscape videos and 5 or 6 vertical videos every week. I’m failing most weeks, but getting better. There are currently only 206 subscribers to the VibesDIY YouTube account, but there was just 34 when I started.

Professional Video Workflow:

Establish consistent production rhythm (2 long-form + 6 short videos/week)
Faster and better editing and post-production techniques
Content planning and scheduling

KmikeyM Application: My KmikeyM channel has 226 subscribers but I haven’t updated anything there in 8 months. Can I apply the workflow and skills I’m using at Vibes directly to KmikeyM?

Financial Benefits

Obviously I’m making more than I was at McDonald’s. I’m enjoying some of the fruits of my labor but also contributing much more to household finances. I even convinced Kathryn to set up a joint account!

We’re prioritizing savings right now in order to build up a longer runway and prepare for our imminent move in 2026.

And in addition stable income, I also have great health insurance and benefits. I’ve started scheduling appointments for blood work, optometrists, dentists, and it’s time to get a colonoscopy, which I’m not looking forward to.

Challenges and Trade-offs

It hasn’t been all positive. The biggest impact has been the time constraints, some of which is just poor management on my part because it’s fun to vibe code a new project, but also the feeling that I’m trying to meaningfully contribute to this new business gives it all a feeling of great stakes.

Fitness has been impacted the most. I haven’t figured out how to incorporate my exercise routine into the new work schedule. I’ve put on weight and the last time I went to the gym there was a noticeable decline.

As I mentioned, Shareholder Engagement has been stalled. There have been no shareholder votes, much less community interaction or project updates, and no new KmikeyM content and or projects

Foundation Maintenance

External Stressors: This 90-day period coincided with some significant other challenges as well, primarily our housing instability and the prolonged and poorly managed eviction process. Managing all this has been more stressful than I like to admit. And combined with work it’s required most of my mental bandwidth.

Remaining Q4 Goals

I tend to over plan, so for now I’m going to focus on the rest of 2025 as a way to get back on track with my health and fitness goals and get KmikeyM priorities integrated with my new work life.

Immediate Priorities

Health Foundation: Return to consistent exercise routine, weight management
Shareholder Re-Engagement: Increase KmikeyM communication and come up with new ideas for votes
Skills Application: Begin using new skills for Personal/KmikeyM as well as Vibes

Request for Shareholder Input

As I enter the next phase looking for better work-life integration, I’d value shareholder guidance on:

Health Priorities: What’s the right way to prioritize fitness and health while also trying to work at “startup levels?”
Content Direction: Is there shareholder interest in vibe coding content? Perhaps votes on projects to build or woking on projects together for KmikeyM channels?
KmikeyM Management: Can the community take more of a lead in KmikeyM operations? Perhaps votes from shareholders? More board level engagement? More accountability?

Build Week 2025 gives us a slightly more inclusive group of shareholders who have restricted access, which means I can be more open in the Discord and other semi-private channels. I hope this leads to more direct involvement in the process of “KmikeyM” as a project that involves all the shareholders.

Conclusion

The past 90 days required temporary sacrifice of some KmikeyM engagement and personal optimization in exchange for significant investment into work. While challenging, this is an investment I expect to pay dividends through new capabilities, professional network expansion, and an improved financial foundation.

The publicly traded person experiment continues, now with the added dimension of additional technical capabilities and improved content creation skills that should create more opportunities for shareholder-guided value creation.

Stopped at McD for a Snack Wrap and saw the pile of “boo buckets” prepped for spooky season. Crazy that my time at McDonald’s assembling boo buckets during the slow parts of my shift was just a year ago.

Membership

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 15:17:54 GMT

After an incredibly productive Build Week 2025 I’m incredibly excited to announce not just the implementation of the Membership Share but the launch of Memberships Tiers. While this offers a way for people to support the project, it’s also the scaffolding for building new layers of access, tools, and influence.

Whether you’re looking to make trades, increase your decision-making power, or just support the experiment there is now a membership tier to match your desired level of involvement.

And an incredible thank you to shareholder Aaron who has made these changes possible. Build Week 2025 was wildly productive and I’m already plotting about 2026 (especially since we didn’t get to my “stretch goal” of a shareholder gambling game).

🆕 KmikeyM Memberships

With the introduction of Membership Shares we have also limited access to aspects of the KmikeyM experiment. Starting from today only those who hold at least one share will be able to:

Read the details of the vote pages
See the list of Buy and Sell offers
See the Leaderboard or User Directory
Access the link to the Discord invite

This represents a divide between the shareholder and non-shareholder. To participate in KmikeyM people will have to buy at least 1 share, which then unlocks the ability to see these parts.

Membership Tiers

Membership is based on four levels. First is the basic Shareholder level, which is suitable for the majority of users. The shareholder can buy shares, vote, and access the discord (the link will appear in the footer once you’re logged in).

The next level is a $25 per year Trader account. This unlocks the ability to use all the features of the market and making deposits into your account (essential for buy orders). Note: all current accounts have been grandfathered in a Trader account that lasts until the end of 2025.

The next level is the Pro Trader account at $60 per year. The pro account offers reduced fees on deposits, options for no-fee manual transfers, and is eligible for dividends (note: we have not yet implemented a dividends feature).

Beyond the Pro Trader level is Board Member. For $1500 you can purchase a two year term on my personal Board of Directors. This gives you access to all the benefits of the Pro Trader in addition to a seat on the board and access to the Boardroom channel of the Discord where high level strategic decisions are made.

We have a pricing page for those interested in looking to upgrade.

Privacy and Governance

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:58:41 GMT

My involvement with Blippo+ required confidentiality during development. In the past I’ve often asked myself “What Would the Shareholders Want?” when faced with something that I can’t put to a vote. And after 17 years of being publicly traded I have a general sense of the desires of the collective, but I think we can do better.

Thinking about governance.

Looking back I can see three workable solutions to the problems:

Mike Acts Alone – This is the route I chose for Blippo+. The project required secrecy and so I decided my involvement was more important than formal shareholder approval.
Board Oversight – This solution didn’t exist at the time, but having a board of directors means I have a semi-private solution where I can ask the board to act as a proxy for the shareholders.
Coded Disclosure – I experimented with this a little, but a way to maintain privacy as well as share at least how much effort is involved would be to apply a code-name to a private project.

So thinking about how a formal process like this would work, there would likely be some sort of threshold from Mike Acts Alone to Board Oversight to Coded Disclosure. To keep it simple this is probably best measure in hours per week.

~ 2-5 hours per week for no more than a month – Mike Alone
~ 5-10 hours per week for anything longer than a week – Board Oversight
> 10 hours per week for anything longer than a week – Coded Disclosure

Examples

Making a Zine – Kathryn and Mike decide to make a zine based on their idea for Classic Blasts. Assuming this is about 3 hours of work a week for two to three weeks, this is a Mike Acts Alone project.

Co-Host a Podcast – Mike is invited to be a regular co-host of a podcast someone else is producing, editing, etc. If he is putting in about 4 hours a week this would require notification and Board Oversight.

Writing a Screenplay (film of tv) – Mike is taking on (likely with a partner) a major effort to create a tv or film project. He’s spending hours every day on his for multiple weeks. This would require board oversight and a Coded Disclosure to the shareholders.

Full Time Job – Mike is recruited for a new full time job, but is required to wait until it’s official before announcing. This would require Board Oversight.

New Venture – Mike is founding or co-founding a new company or project. This would be a regular public vote because there is no requirement for confidentiality.

The Proposal

Should KmikeyM adopt a formal, time-based governance policy for confidential projects that cannot be disclosed publicly at the time of initiation?

☐ Yes – Adopt the proposed protocol, which uses expected time commitment to determine governance routing (Mike Alone, Board Oversight, and Coded Disclosure).
☐ No – Do not change. Things are working fine. Continue relying on Mike’s personal discretion in managing confidential projects.
☐ Revise – I support the idea of formal governance for confidential projects, but recommend adjustments. (Please explain in comments.)

🗳️ Vote Here

Note: hours per week updated based on shareholder feedback

Blippo+

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:14:09 GMT

You know that part of a movie where the hero has to go out and put the misfit team together? Back in 2023 that happened to me… I was recruited as a member of a secret team with a daring plan:

What if there was an alien signal that reached earth because we accidentally replicated the same technology as their television?

That idea turned into the epic undertaking of making Blippo+.

Blippo+ is out now on Playdate!

It all started years ago when Panic asked Jona and Claire of YACHT if they had ideas for a Playdate game. Jona sketched some initial ideas for something based on an EPG, or Electronic Program Guide. That idea evolved into an entire universe of television shows.

They took this idea back to Panic and, using Jona’s proprietary PTP™ method, were given the green light. Now they just had to make it. So they went out and gathered a team.

This initial group included me, and also JJ Stratford and Roni Levi of Telefantasy Studios. (Years ago JJ had been the GM of our Shadowrun game, where magic and tech collide. I played as a disgraced ex-corporate businesswoman.) Then Dustin Mierau came on as the developer. And then so many, many more.

YACHT describes Blippo+ as a sci-fi movie disguised as a TV streaming service disguised as a video game.

The story’s simple: on the other side of the galaxy exists the radical post-capitalist Planet Blip. It’s like a version of Earth where humanity evolved from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse characters instead of primates. They love TV, and Blippo+ is their streaming service of choice. It’s got sitcoms, soaps, news, weather, dance and cooking shows, teletext messages, and more. And when something big happens on Planet Blip (spoiler: something big happens on Planet Blip) Blippo+ has it.

My Role: Executive Producer

I have a few official credits for Blippo+. First I am an “Executive Producer” which is the greatest title for a person who loves projects. An executive producer is the modern day éminence grise , which is a role that I was born to play. For Blippo+ I did some spreadsheets, organized an Airtable, and took charge of paperwork (there was a LOT of paperwork!). I have a brief cameo as ‘Lenny’ the line cook in Countertop, but my favorite credit is ‘Very Best Boy’ based on my unskilled but very enthusiastic my on-set contributions (gofer, slate, boom operator, assistant to all).

And with the upcoming PC/Switch version it means that my face as Lenny will be on Nintendo, which means I’m one step closer to being a character on Super Smash Bros.

One of the hardest parts of working on a project like this as a publicly traded person is that it’s been done in secret for the past several years. These kinds of opportunities are made partly possible because of the support of my community of shareholders and there is even a nice mention in the credits:

Trapped in UnSAFE Conditions

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 17:01:21 GMT

Part I: Values at War

“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” – Warren Buffett

When I learned that the founder of a company I invested in had not only volunteered to work at DOGE, but specifically worked at the Dept. of Veteran Affairs, it was clear that he had wildly different beliefs and ethics than me.

As I read about Sahil Lavingia being proud to “serve” those who served I was incredibly angry, and then I was completely disgusted when he used his position to garner media attention for himself, which got him fired, which he then used to get more media attention.

His self stated goal from the beginning was based on a selfish and egotistical desire to “ship code for the federal government” and it’s clear he knew this was going to get him a lot of attention (and he was right).

Feeling a bit of online rage I updated my LinkedIn where I mentioned the investment I’d made, and emailed support at Republic (which hosted his raise) and Sahil Lavingia himself to ask about getting out of my investment.

The support team of Republic wrote back and said:

Ultimately, for a company to repurchase your security and formally release you from your investment, both the issuer and the investor must agree to the terms. This process typically requires the issuer to engage legal counsel to draft a proper release agreement. If the issuer in this case, Gumroad is not willing to entertain a repurchase or release, then unfortunately there is no mechanism to unilaterally relinquish your investment.

And I didn’t hear anything from Sahil Lavingia.

A month later, feeling trapped and frustrated, I posted a ‘Review” to the Gumroad listing on Republic laying out my issue. It was buried in the 1,792 other reviews but I felt that at least I had a public record of my disappointment.

I was a little surprised when I got an almost immediate response from Republic.

So now I had to make a decision about what I wanted, so I took it to the shareholders:

🗳️ Private Investment Pickle: Renounce My Gumroad Investment

After a it of discussion the shareholders helped me to check my emotions and decide if the ethical choice outweighed the financial choice. It was a very close vote, but they agreed I should sever ties.

Part II: Terms of Disengagement

Exit is the foundational right in any system. Without it, you’re a subject, not a participant. — based on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

Now I was committed on what to do, but pretty unsure on how to do it. I find it pretty strange that a person can’t just leave an investment. I mean, I “own” it but I can’t transfer it, sell it, or even destroy it?

So I started to dig into what the agreement actually was that i signed, and what that means in terms of obligations. I am not a lawyer, but I came up with the following arguments for why I should be allowed to exit:

Nature of SAFE as a Contingent Right, Not Equity
A SAFE is not a share of stock or ownership interest in the company; it is a contractual right to potentially receive future equity upon a qualifying event (e.g., Equity Financing or Liquidity Event). As such, no equity interest exists yet that requires divestiture or formal transfer under corporate law.
Absence of Consideration for Future Equity Unless Triggered
Given that the SAFE only converts upon specified future events, and none have occurred, I hold an executory interest, not a vested one. So I’d argue that I am choosing to waive any claim to this contingent right, effectively treating the original purchase ($350) as a sunk cost.
Doctrine of Waiver
My understanding is that under contract law, a party may waive a contractual right by clear and intentional relinquishment. This is especially applicable to non-material terms or benefits that have not yet vested. So I’d argue I am unilaterally waiving all rights under the SAFE, including any potential future conversion rights or cash-out rights.
Public Policy and Disassociation
Because my motivation is reputational disassociation, I’d also argue that continued nominal association against my will (even as a non-voting, non-equity stakeholder) constitutes reputational harm, which I think supports a waiver or release request under public policy grounds.
No Harm to the Issuer
Because the SAFE involves a non-refundable contribution, and Gumroad has already received and used the funds, there is no financial or operational harm to the company by allowing a voluntary forfeiture. In fact, it reduces their future capitalization obligations!

With my decision ratified by shareholders and my arguments laid out for my case it was then time to make the ask. I did this in via an email to Sahil Lavingia where I wrote a professional but firm email with an attached PDF of my signed Waiver and Voluntary Relinquishment and my arguments.

Subject: Relinquishing My Investment in Gumroad

Hi Sahil,

I’m writing as an early investor in Gumroad through the 2021 crowdfunding round. But more importantly, I’m writing as a U.S. Army veteran who once believed in what you were building.

I was proud to support a platform that seemed to empower creators and challenge traditional gatekeepers. But recently, I learned about your volunteer work with DOGE, and specifically your involvement in using AI to evaluate and recommend reductions at the Department of Veterans Affairs. I can’t overstate how deeply disappointing, and frankly, personal, that feels.

The VA isn’t perfect, but it represents a promise: that those who serve their country won’t be forgotten. Cutting services, especially under the guidance of algorithms and outside consultants, feels like a betrayal of that promise. It’s not just a policy disagreement, this is a moral line I can’t cross.

Because of this, I’ve decided to publicly and permanently forfeit my SAFE investment in Gumroad. I want no association, financial or otherwise, with the company going forward.

I hope you’ll understand and respect this decision. I ask that you formally acknowledge my relinquishment and ensure I am removed from all investor-related materials and communications moving forward.

This is more than just a statement, it’s a stand, and I intend for it to be public. I believe who we choose to associate with matters, and I no longer wish to be associated with you or your endeavors.

Sincerely,
K. Mike Merrill

Part III: No Exit

“Uncertainty is the price of agency.” — KmikeyM

After all my effort and feelings with this situation, I was quite surprised when I got an email back in about an hour from Sahil Lavingia.

No intention to cut services, but increase them by redirecting resources away from those that weren’t serving veterans. You should read my blog itself.

There’s no way to relinquish your investment to my knowledge but will keep in mind if there is in the future.

Sahil

This is exactly what I should have expected. It’s noncommittal, evasively framed, and strategically defensive.

“No intention to cut services…”

He’s asserting that it wasn’t cuts, but efficiency he was after. This is classic policy spin: reduce line-item A and increase line-item B, claim a net moral gain. But it’s pretty obviously bullshit, as he signed on under Musk who was appointed by Trump who both claimed over and over that the goal was cuts. To claim that was not his intention speaks to incredible stupidity about the world he was entering, and also completely side-steps that intent doesn’t negate impact. My objection was based on values and association, not the budgetary math of his “intentions.”

“You should read my blog itself.”

A wonderfully dismissive attempt to reassert narrative control without engaging my moral position, as well as another incredibly stupid assumption that I had not read it. His knee-jerk reaction views my interpretation as misinformed and not morally valid, likely because it attacks his sense of self. He can’t acknowledge my personal stake or veteran identity because it undermines his egotistic view as someone who was trying to “help.”

“There’s no way to relinquish your investment to my knowledge…”

The key phrase here is “to my knowledge”. This is strategic vagueness, a way to avoid liability by claiming ignorance. He absolutely could facilitate a waiver or internal notation of disassociation, even if it was just symbolic. But he’s opting out because it sets a dangerous precedent (I’m likely not the first person to be unhappy about his associations and volunteer efforts).

“Will keep in mind if there is in the future.”

A clear fuck off line that says I don’t want to deal with this.

What’s Next?

I knew the system offered no formal exit, but I still hoped a direct well-thought out appeal might matter. Why would anyone want an unwilling, antagonistic investor?

Instead, I got what most power structures run by bootlickers deliver when confronted by dissent: fearful dismissal wrapped in plausible deniability.

I am, functionally, still a shareholder. Not by choice, but by design. The architecture of these agreements offers no off-ramp. A SAFE is not equity, not a loan, and not ownership. It’s a belief system codified into legal paperwork. And like most belief systems, it has no protocol for renunciation. (That’s one reason I love markets: they allow exit.)

So this is my public notice.
I reject this association.
I reject Sahil Lavingia and his ego-driven projects.

And if I can’t leave quietly, then I will stay very loud.

🧾 Uninvestor Resources

If you participated in the Gumroad SAFE and are now seeking disassociation, you’re not alone.

📄 Template Letter: Access my waiver and arguments as a Google Doc
📧 Need Contact Info? I can share Sahil’s email upon request by other investors.

This is about more than an investment. It’s about consent, values, and the right to exit. If enough of us make our positions clear, we set a precedent for ethical disengagement and send a message of accountability.

M.I.K.E. Community Bond Program

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:21:02 GMT

The following is the updated language for the new MIKE trust protocol.

Approved w/ 91% Support

The Mutual Image Known Endorsement (MIKE) is an extension of the community-building spirit of the KmikeyM project.

A MIKE is a permanent symbol of connection with a matching (or thematically linked) tattoo shared between members of the shareholder community and Mike Merrill.

MIKEs are not granted lightly, and participants will be subject to a three phase process:

Eligibility Phase: The person or company must pass a background check (the same process as the former VTAC endorsement) where references are provided and interviewed, which happens only if the person or company meets one of the three Eligibility Requirements (see below).
Connection Phase: The details, however specific or vague, of the image or theme will be agreed on by both parties as a representation of the connection between the parties.
Bonding Phase: A date and location will be determined, ideally at the same place and time with the same tattoo artist, but under extreme circumstances perhaps done remotely (in all circumstances, Mike will get his tattoo second). Once the tattoos have been administered and had time to heal they will be revealed and the participant will be officially added to the list of those endorsed by MIKE.

Eligibility

To participate, a shareholder must meet one of three criteria:

Hold 100 or more shares
Have been a shareholder for 5+ years
Pay $1,000 directly to Mike to initiate the process*

*This is in place of owning 100 shares or knowing Mike for five or more years and therefore is a non-refundable fee even if the person or company fails the background check or violates Mike’s trust.

Cost

Participants must also cover the cost of both tattoos, including any related expenses. Mike reserves the right to waive this fee or lower the standards of the tattoo (for example, perhaps a stick-and-poke is the right method in a particular circumstance) at his discretion.

Benefits

Primarily the benefit is, and should be for all parties, having a cool tattoo. However, this particular tattoo is also a bonded endorsement and therefore carries some additional perks.

Once endorsed the participants can count on Mike for letters of recommendation, LinkedIn endorsements, and positive references as needed. (Note: previous VTAC endorsements will be grandfathered into the MIKE program.)

Violations of Trust

Should any previously endorsed participant violate the trust of Mike Merrill the tattoo will be blacked out (not removed) and the endorsements revoked.

VTAC is now MIKE

The MIKE is an evolution from a trust project which was approved in 2009 with 97% shareholder approval.

VTAC (Validation of Trusted Authenticity Certificate) was proposed as a physical trust protocol created as a tattoo endorsement by K. Mike Merrill for companies and people he truly trusts.

Inspired by digital EV Certificates, VTAC was designed to improve virtual indicators with permanent body ink, signaling a deeper, personal verification process. The first test partner was the software company Panic who announced the inaugural endorsement in 2012.

As digital EV certification lost significance it was time to update VTAC. With 88% shareholder approval it was decided in 2025 to update to the MIKE protocol.

Aesthetic Drift

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 10:06:42 GMT

In the early days of KmikeyM I was known for wearing only Brooks Brothers because, as I said in an interview,

“It seems like a publicly traded person would wear Brooks Brothers.”

Many are surprised to learn this was never a shareholder vote, and was only ever ratified by the shareholders through the approval of the former relationship contracts. Brooks Brothers was a choice I made to enhance the image of KmikeyM.

That image became a problem in 2013 when I co-founded a startup with Marcus Estes. As a tech co-founder it was a little weird to dress in all Brooks Brothers when the uniform at the time was jeans and a hoodie made famous by Mark Zuckerberg. Lucky for me Brooks Brothers was in an expansion mode and I was able to find a kind of “banker on the weekend” look that worked out for us.

Mike and Marcus podcasting from the OMSI building in Portland, OR.

After Chroma I worked a number of gigs where the Brooks edge was slowly dulled, and then I moved to Los Angeles where the climate and a new role made much of my Brooks wardrobe impractical.

As time went on I gave up my suits for just a dress shirt and pants, and then the dress shirts became t-shirts, and I kind of resisted shorts and jeans for a while making a kind of new more casual LA uniform.

The final push of my abandonment of Brooks was when I started dating Kathryn. Her idea of formal is a t-shirt that she hasn’t cut the sleeves of off. With her occasional clothing gifts infiltrating my closet the Brooks Brothers days were numbered.

And then during covid Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Sartorially lost, I went full Psychedelic Professor, ready to give my talk on “Altered States of Capitalism.”

As civilization started back up I realized I was feeling conceptually naked. I felt like I had no persona to build around. I ended up developing a new style I called “Regular Guy” with the goal being to wear clothes that blended me into the background. This look was augmented a bit with the launch of Hamburger Business Review and Jona helped me customize my grey polo.

This era coincided with the season 2 adventure of working at McDonald’s, which of course included a return to a real uniform.

Post-McDonald’s I kept wearing my company issued jeans for a while until Kathryn bought me a pair of vintage Levi’s, found me a dirty pair of worn out carharrt pants in the back of the wood shop she took over, and started to find old t-shirts with the perfect fit. It’s a return to the days of my “casual LA” look, but now with intention.

One of the lines in the opening of that interview I gave about wearing all Brooks Brothers was:

“Some people are just jeans, t-shirt, no thought. But jeans and t-shirt can look good if it’s done intentionally. When it’s intentional, it’s actually powerful.”

This look matches up with the recent vote for the aviator sunglasses and my post-McDonald’s mustache for a kind of LA Tactical Dad energy. It’s about utility, community, and function while being a bit more disciplined and less playful.

The aesthetics of KmikeyM have always been a signal. The initial design of the website was based on a bank, and the original wardrobe was what bankers wear. Fashion is a form of cultural soft power, but it reflects back on me as much I project it outward.

This current look is a response to shareholder votes, local climate, personal gifts, and my social environment. Like my share price, it represents a trend responding to those forces over time. In some ways it still feels like a publicly traded person should still wear Brooks Brothers. On the other hand, responding to the actual influences on my life makes this combination of clothing feel like this is what I should wear.

Just for fun, here are some various “fit pics” of me throughout the years:

This was my first sport coat which I got from Josh because it was too big for him. It was a fantastic soft camel blazer and I miss it. 2003

I don’t play music and this is a fake mustache. From a sketch we did as part of Ultimate Blogger, our web reality show. 2006

A real mustache, but another staged scene for the final season of Ultimate Blogger where my character was a down-on-luck conman who had to “put the band back together” before the show could happen again. 2007

Early days of working at Panic when I was just embracing my formal look, but hadn’t switched to Brooks Brothers yet. 2008

In New York for my Today Show appearance and of course had to go shopping at the original Brooks Brothers store. Was fully head to toe Brooks at this point except my Tom Ford classes and Nike Fuelband. 2013

During the Chroma days I added more casual brands mixed with Brooks Brothers. 2016

This was a video for YACHT where I played an emotionally earnest, artisan coffee barista who loves flea markets, camping, and is trying desperately to learn the banjo. 2017

The beard and hair policy of the pandemic created a stark contrast to “Flat Mike,” the cardboard cut-out that was part of a trade show booth. 2020.

The bearded Mike look coincided with winter in Canada and allowed me to embrace a look that really speaks to my Alaskan roots. 2021

Brock Badgers

Did not buy this

A rugged look

We biked so much that I spent half my time in bike cloths during the pandemic. 2021

And some random pics from childhood to basic training…

Private Investment Pickle

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:45:32 GMT

We usually think of ownership as an option. You choose to own something, and when you don’t want to own it anymore you sell it, give it away, or toss it. But sometimes the thing you own isn’t really a “thing” and the terms of your involvement mean you are trapped with it.

In 2021 I spent $350 on “the right to certain shares of Gumroad.” This awkward wording comes from the Crowd SAFE (Crowdfunding Simple Agreement for Future Equity) agreement I signed from the fundraise Gumroad did on Republic.co. (A SAFE is a common instrument in early-stage venture capital, allowing investors to provide capital to a startup without immediately receiving equity.) As a longtime user and customer of Gumroad I was excited to be able to claim to be a part-owner.

I didn’t think much about the details of the document until hearing that the Gumroad founder, Sahil Lavingia, was in the news recently for being fired from his volunteer efforts with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in reducing the size of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

As a Veteran this made me angry. For all the many flaws of the VA I find the arrogance and hubris of thinking you could “engineer” a better solution without considering the impact on actual Veterans to be reprehensible. In addition, taking on a role like this under an administration that demeans and exploits veterans isn’t just naïve… it’s complicit.

In my anger I wanted to distance myself from the grandstanding efforts of Sahil Lavingia. I reached out to Republic and Mr. Lavingia about selling or even forfeiting my “right to certain shares” as a way to rid myself of being professionally associated as an investor in his enterprise. Turns out, there isn’t much recourse.

Section Five of the agreement is titled Transfer Restrictions and states:

… the Investor further agrees not to make any disposition of all or any portion of this instrument or the underlying securities …

I find the idea of being trapped in an association with a person I find detrimental to my reputation as unjust. But what can I do? I signed the Crowd SAFE agreement back in 2021 and I’m bound by the laws of the United States of America.

Shareholder Question: Surrender My Investment

Understanding that I am legally trapped in a formal association with Sahil Lavingia, should I sent a Notice of Waiver and Voluntary Relinquishment of my SAFE Investment to Mr. Lavingia? In this notice I would offer to waive my rights, claims, or interests in Gumroad in exchange for being expunged from the records of SAFE holders. This would represent a complete loss of my initial investment, and I would go so far as to even offer to cover the administrative costs of removal.

Having funded a founder who has turned out to have a wildly different set of ethics than me, whose actions I find grotesque, I would rather take a financial loss than be associated with his success.

But perhaps this is too emotional a reaction? Rationally should I stay the course and wait to reap the future financial rewards? I am thankful to have the counsel of my shareholders to help me in this ethical dilemma.

VOTE HERE

Updates:

June 6, 2025: ProPublica: DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts

One Pair of Sunglasses

Wed, 07 May 2025 14:51:30 GMT

I only get one pair of sunglasses. It’s either that, or I get contacts, or I suppose I could get rich and be able to afford many pairs. When you only get one pair, the question of which pair is more difficult. What do my sunglasses say about me?

I remember working with a designer on a KmikeyM project and they used the outline of my glasses as an icon. I was surprised because I never considered my glasses an essential part of my identity (I have a completely different style as a back up pair), but looking back I have been wearing my Tom Ford frames for a VERY LONG time.

Back in 2022 I was considering new frames and I asked my shareholders if they wanted control, if I should stick with what works, or if I should get a bunch of pairs and treat eyewear with less seriousness. Of course they voted for control.

Unfortunately I didn’t end up getting new glasses in 2022, or 2023, or 2024. And then Kathryn surprised me for my birthday and got me a new pair of my “iconic” frames, the Tom Ford TF 5178, which were inspired by Colin Firth’s character in A Single Man (2009).

So while I wait for my new lenses to be added to the frames I am looking to get also update the lenses in my prescription sunglasses. And because of the cost of prescription lenses, I’m only going to get a single pair. And because I live in Los Angeles I’m going to be wearing these new glasses a lot.

Of all the possible styles, I am reduced it to three essential choices, each of which says something different about how I present myself.

Wayfarer Style

These are my current sunglasses. I have the 2012 Ray-Ban x Brooks Brothers collab pair. These are a classic and can be worn everywhere. I don’t need to get Ray-Bans as every brand has a similar style and they range from pretty expensive to very cheap.

These also don’t say much. They are the just “sunglasses” and don’t express much, but that is also why they are universal.

Aviator Style

The first aviator sunglasses were commissioned by the US military in 1935, but the iconic image in my mind is a blend of Tom Selleck and seeing my Dad wear them everyday as a pilot and a State Trooper in Alaska. These don’t demand a mustache, but they certainly encourage it.

These are a choice. While still incredibly common and universal, they are a bit more intentional than the wayfarer style. They seem more “professional” and a bit more mature to me.

Wraparound Style

Heavily inspired by Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers character military character’s like Matt Damon in Green Zone, these don’t have to be just rad Oakley’s. They could be sporty Nike’s or some DTC brand.

As my only pair of sunglasses this would be an extreme choice. They would be great for riding my bike or playing tennis or going to the range. But what if I’m at a fancy event in a suit and tie and it’s sunny? I mean, it still seems rad to wear these, but do I want to be rad all the time? (I think so?)

And so I present these options to my shareholders, giving them a lot of influence over how I present myself in the wonderful city of Los Angeles, or anywhere I find myself that the sun is shining. Thank you for your consideration.

VOTE HERE

Rating The Ratings

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:26:25 GMT

We live in a world of ratings. Stars, percentages, grades, medals… every choice, decision, and opinion is (or can be) filtered through a score. Pick a movie, book a hotel, download an app, podcast, or get a ride and you are compelled to give a rating.

Ratings are the fuel to keep the algorithms churning and buried inside all these numbers is a bigger question: what’s the best way to rate anything? Some systems feel intuitive. Others feel forced. A few pretend to offer precision but just end up confusing and meaningless.

If we’re forced to live by ratings, we should be more intentional about which system we use, and ensure the systems we use are human readable and not just fodder to train the machine on “engagement.”

Even beef has an eight point grading system to identify quality: Prime, Choice, Good, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.

How to Judge the Judges

What makes a rating system good? A good rating system does real work. It tells you something fast and gives you enough nuance to make an actual decision. It’s easy to read, but also easy to submit.

Talking with some of the most opinionated and critical people I know has uncovered four essential criteria for a rating system:

1. Simplicity

A great system is instantly understandable. You shouldn’t need a tutorial or any understanding of maths.

2. Expressiveness

It needs range. Can you express love, hate, or a few shades in between? A binary system is fast but perhaps too blunt. On the other side, too much granularity gets muddy. What is the Goldilocks range?

3. Cultural Familiarity

Good systems feel natural. We recognize them, we trust them, and we don’t need to second-guess what they mean. A well-known scale speeds up decision-making because we’ve already internalized the stakes.

4. Durability

Ratings are most useful if they hold their value over time. Systems that collapse into inflation (like Uber’s pass/fail masquerading as a 5-point scale, or the creeping rise of academic grades) fail here. Durability means a 3-star rating today still feels like a 3-star tomorrow.

The Landscape of Ratings

There are a nearly infinite number of contenders. Let’s examine some examples, each with strengths, each with flaws, and try to understand what works and doesn’t. Through the lens of simplicity, expressiveness, familiarity, and durability, here’s how some system stack up:

Simple Binary: Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down

The cleanest possible system, perfected by Siskel & Ebert, and instantly understandable. No middle ground, no hedging. You like it, or you don’t.

Simplicity: Perfect.
Expressiveness: Weak. No nuance.
Familiarity: Universal.
Durability: Stable, but limited.

Binary systems work well for speed but fall apart when you want to say, “It was fine, but not great.” Useful, but blunt-force. Works better with a group where Siskel and Ebert can give different ratings.

Tiered Categories: Medals, Stars, Ribbons

Gold, silver, bronze. One star, two stars, five stars. These systems give you hierarchy without overwhelming detail.

Simplicity: Strong.
Expressiveness: Moderate. Enough range for basic nuance.
Familiarity: Very high. Everyone knows what gold or “5-stars” means.
Durability: Holds up well over time.

Tiered categories hit a sweet spot. They’re intuitive, familiar, and they scale. Crucially, they avoid the false precision trap, but the middle (3-stars) can become a meaningless dumping ground.

Percentage Systems / Decimals

Nothing feels more scientific than a percentage. But this is often a lie.

Simplicity: Deceptively simple.
Expressiveness: Overly precise for no reason.
Familiarity: High, but misunderstood.
Durability: Weak. Easy to inflate, hard to trust.

An 87%, or an “8.7” feels precise, but does it really mean anything? Most of the time, these numbers are just window dressing for simpler systems underneath.

The counterpoint to this was the old Pitchfork reviews (the chart is a distribution of their reviews from Analysis of Pitchfork Music Reviews) where it was clear a lot of time and agony was spent on the different between a 6.7 and a 6.8. This worked great for them, but most of us are not willing to spend quite so much time on the decimals.

Academic Grades: A–F

We all know this one. Built into our lives early, but loaded with emotional baggage.

Simplicity: Familiar, but slightly coded (what’s a “C” really mean?).
Expressiveness: Moderate to high, depending on the use of +/-.
Familiarity: Extremely high.
Durability: Poor. Grade inflation killed this system.

The problem is inflation. In school, a “C” is technically average—but culturally, it feels like failure. Grades have become skewed to the top and suffer from the “Uber problem” where anything that isn’t an A feels like a failure.

Official Certifications: MPAA, LEED, Bond Ratings

Standardized, regulated, and supposedly neutral. In practice, bureaucratic and opaque.

Simplicity: Low. Requires explanation.
Expressiveness: Narrow and rigid.
Familiarity: Moderate, but depends on context.
Durability: Variable. Some hold up, others feel outdated fast.

These systems try to codify judgment, but the bureaucracy means they often lag behind culture. MPAA ratings tell you less about quality and more about what the censors think. LEED certifies building efficiency, but good design doesn’t always align with green checkboxes. And bond ratings? A complete maze. AAA, BB+, junk status—it is completely inaccessible to anyone outside of finance. Worse, the rating agencies have a history of getting it wrong, sometimes catastrophically. These system feels both overly complex and strangely fragile.

The Original Netflix 5-Star System

Let’s talk about perfection.

The original Netflix 5-star system wasn’t just good—it kicked off a new golden age of ratings. The original system presented five clear choices, each one carrying real meaning:

5 stars: Really love it!
4 stars: Love it.
3 stars: Like it.
2 stars: Don’t like it.
1 star: Hate it.

What made it work? Simplicity and clarity. You always knew what you were saying. No guessing, no bloated scale full of meaningless decimals. You picked your spot, and your spot meant something.

Even better: Netflix designed the scale with a slight optimism bias. The middle point, 3 stars, wasn’t neutral. It was like it. You still had to choose—at minimum—whether you liked the thing or not. There was no dead-zone, no “meh” vote, no sitting on the fence. Every rating leaned into action. It forced an opinion. And that’s exactly what a rating system should do.

For movies, this was ideal. Films live and die by emotional reaction, and this system captured that perfectly. There was room for nuance without slowing you down in the finer points of a 6.7 vs. 6.8.

Of course, Netflix abandoned the five stars in 2017. In an act of corporate cowardice they buckled under the weight of their own data obsession and swapped it for a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down system, claiming it was “simpler.” But what they really did was drain the expressiveness out of the experience. They traded UX clarity for bluntness, and nuance for efficiency.

Choose Your Rating System Wisely

In the end, it’s clear: not all rating systems are built to last. Some collapse under their own weight, like the bloated percentage scores that pretend to offer precision but instead deliver noise. Others are sabotaged by their own incentives, like Uber and Airbnb, where anything less than a perfect score quietly counts as failure. The system might look nuanced, but the corporate overlords turn it into pass/fail.

Netflix’s former 5-star system, though, holds the line. Five clear points of differentiation. Enough nuance to express real opinion, slightly skewed to optimism, and without slipping into meaningless decimal dust. It’s fast, it’s easy to understand, and crucially—it resists inflation. The stars hold their meaning.

If we’re going to be serious about rating things, we need to be serious about rating systems. If we want to actually express taste, opinion, and quality, there’s one clear “5-star” option. The former Netflix 5-star is the best rating system ever created and I really love it.

McJob: Part 2

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:07:07 GMT

Back in September I asked the shareholders if I should just apply to McDonald’s. After a lot of discussion, the vote passed with 72% approval. I applied and I got hired.

I was surprised by two things:

how hard the job is
how hard my coworkers worked

I took being at the bottom of one of the largest and most successful companies in the world as an opportunity. We produced an amazing season 2 of Hamburger Business Review and I gained an appreciation of the amount of effort it takes to make a job so simple it can be run by high school kids. You do not understand the power of process until you understand McDonald’s!

After six months I’m now very comfortable working with the public, I understand menu, the POS system, and how to multitask within my little drive thru corner of the restaurant.

I have developed my own checklists for when I start a shift, to check the commonly missing items, which items are blocked (and if there are new items), stocking up the printer tape, and prepping Happy Meal boxes for assembly during my shift.

During my shift I take responsibility for keeping the fries stocked. While I can’t run the fry station from the drive thru, there are enough small breaks that I can keep the hopper loaded and the small freezer stocked to ensure what the fries keep coming.

None of the process and prep and additional duties were assigned. I developed them as I started to understand the larger system I was operating in and how to best support my team mates. It reminds me so much of the Army.

The process and systems thinking has even been integrated into my regular life. I created a weekly household inventory checklist, started to be more specific about where things go, and of course, keeping surfaces clean.

And I’ve found I’m a morning person. I always suspected this, but with a 7am start time to my shift I kept getting up earlier and earlier so I’d have some time to myself, eventually setting my alarm to 5am. It’s still dark out, and it’s quiet, and I get to start my day off by myself and it’s wonderful.

But for all the positives there are three big down sides.

I am not enthusiastic about the product, and other than my burger explorations videos I am off fast food. I skip my free meals and don’t use my discount opportunity.
The compensation is low.
Related to the money is the time. Looking at the bi-weekly timesheets there is a real sense of loss.

I do now actually enjoy most of my time working there. I love my co-workers. They are some of the most dedicated and hardworking people I’ve ever met. I love the range of folks I get to work with and it’s been fun to get to know, and be known, by the regulars.

I just got paid more for a speaking event that I’ve made the entire time I’ve been working. which made me think I could spend six months working on getting another chance like this vs. working seven hour shifts at the drive thru… I also have some really, really big opportunities in the works and I want to start putting more time into my own projects.

It’s clear to me that working at McDonald’s has more than accomplished the goals I set out to achieve. A renewed confidence, establishing some structure, and giving me a clear sense of my own value.

With that in mind I ask my shareholders, should I quit McDonald’s?

KmikeyM Quick Start Guide

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:53:20 GMT

Welcome to KmikeyM, the world’s first publicly traded person! This guide will help you get started as a shareholder who can influence the real-life decisions of Mike Merrill, engage with the community of other shareholders, and shape the future of KmikeyM.

1. The Basics

KmikeyM is a crowd-based decision-making engine that controls the choices of a real person. You get shares in Mike Merrill, vote on key decisions, participate in discussions, and strategize ways with other players to influence his actions. Your goal? Maximize your influence and shape the direction of Mike’s life and projects. Beyond that, it’s up to you!

What You Need to Start

Become a shareholder
Engage in the community and contribute to decision-making

2. Getting Your First Shares

Buy Shares at KmikeyM.com and create your account.
Or Earn Shares by collaborating with Mike Merrill!
Go to the Market and check the current share price.
Purchase more shares to gain voting power. More shares = more influence.
Sell Shares to gain funds and play the market.
Monitor the market, as prices fluctuate based on activity and demand.

3. Understanding Votes & Influence

Holding shares allows you to vote on major decisions. Here’s how:

Check the Active Votes – See what decisions are currently open.
Research & Discuss – Join the Discord (shareholders only!) to debate strategy with other shareholders.
Cast Your Vote – Use your shares to influence the outcome.
Lobby and Influence – Post your reasons for your choice to influence others.
Watch for Results – Once a vote closes, Mike acts on the decision.

4. Key Mechanics

Shareholder Proposals: Suggest new votes and initiatives.
Buy & Sell Shares: Trade based on strategic moves and market trends.
Narrative & Strategy: Align with factions or form coalitions for influence.
KmikeyM Projects: Get involved in Mike’s real-world ventures (like Hamburger Business Review).

5. Advanced Mode

Become a Power Shareholder – Accumulate shares to gain major voting power.
Join the Board of Directors – If you have enough influence, shape long-term strategy.
Leverage Events & Partnerships – Participate in shareholder summits and exclusive projects.
Market Manipulation? – Predict strategic votes and trade shares accordingly.

6. Next Steps

Read the Blog & Newsletter – Stay updated on key decisions, leave comments and build alliances.
Get active in Discord – Build alliances and shape discourse
Propose Changes – Shape the game from the inside by suggesting new votes and features. Build support from shareholders to enact change.
Experiment & Play – Your choices impact a real-life person!

Welcome to KmikeyM. Your influence starts now!

AAR: HBR Season 2

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 15:36:22 GMT

We finished season 2 of Hamburger Business Review after a run of eight episodes. There was no direct shareholder vote the new season, but it was related to the McJob vote that passed with 72% approval. In the after action review of season 1 I said “I feel a growing expertise about the fast food industry, somewhere right on that edge of realizing how much I don’t know,” and that remains true, but now I am starting to feel a growing expertise.

What is an AAR?

The after action review is a terrifying concept in business. I learned the process in the Army and I’ve tried to use it in every work setting I’ve ever been a part of. But the idea of trying to learn from past experiences forces people to think about what went wrong and what they could have done better, and I’ve never had a boss who wasn’t 100% allergic to this idea.

But KmikeyM is a “Company of One” so I can look at my own projects without having to appease the ego of fragile leaders!

I use a simple version of the AAR that asks:

What happened?
What worked?
What about next time?

What Happened?

What was supposed to happen?

I set out to tackle season 2 with a mission to make something better than season 1. My co-host Zach Rose was on the cusp of his annual McTrot and I was approved to apply for a job at McDonald’s, which gave us some new perspectives to incorporate. We planned on returning to the concept of talking about Harvard Business Review case studies but wanted to add in more personal experiences. We were aiming for 8 to 10 episodes.

In the Season 1 AAR I listed the following as things I would do the same:

Get shareholder support for the podcast creating greater stakes ❌
Set the goal for a single season or specific number of episodes (not an ongoing project that never ends) ✅
Have a co-host ✅
Ensure some ability for paid support from the start ✅

And in terms of things I would do differently I said:

Batch record episodes and then edit to the schedule ✅
Create and document a repeatable process and schedule ✅
Write more in the Substack, give links and context and conclusions and make it a more fun read and not just a vehicle for the audio ✅
Build out better internet presence (social media, web site, etc.) to create a better funnel that would lead people from our personal accounts to HBR-specific accounts and then to the podcast and then to becoming supporters ✅
Create merch for sale (I still want an HBR mug) ❌
Host occasional virtual events to get some audience feedback and share ideas and have a little community ❌
Create more value for paid supporters, highlight them, have them tell their stories, etc. ❌

What actually happened?

We first recruited Chris Higgins. I wanted an editor and producer to help us make the show better. We also got Chris to come on as a co-host, which was terrific. I told Chris to track his hours and I would pay him in shares of KmikeyM.

We were also incredibly lucky to get Kriss Knapp to come in and make us a new logo and also custom editorial illustrations for each episode. We still have a very fun private HBR text thread with everyone on it.

We started off pre-recording a number of episodes, which gave us the slack to be able to meet our goal of a weekly schedule.

I expected the growth of new subscribers to be greater. We ended season 1 with 48 subscribers and ended season 2 with 129, which I was a bit disappointed with.

Financially we had $130 in annual subscriptions and a $500 sponsorship deal.

What were the differences?

Working at McDonald’s and working on the podcast was hard! I wanted to do even more in terms of educating myself, but I barely made a dent in my McD reading list. The time it took to record, edit (well, this was mostly on Chris), post, and then make clips was way more than I expected and I felt constantly behind and like I was doing enough.

This is essentially exactly what I said about episode 1, so you’d think I would have learned a lesson there. Nope.

The quality of our work kept getting better and better as the season went on, and adding guests in the latter part of the season was so much more fun than I expected! Those are some of my favorite episodes.

Without this being an ongoing forever project the growth comes in spurts, but I did really expect more listeners and supporters than we got. I believe there is a real and sizable audience for semi-dry business talk about McDonald’s and what it says about the world, but I am still not sure how to find them.

What Worked?

What worked?

Chris worked! Having a producer and editor really changed the game for us. I wish that McDonald’s or the Beef Council or someone would just pay us to make this show as our full time job. If we could all get paid for this we’d just keep better at it.

Guests worked! Initially just adding Chris’ voice was huge, but then as we talked to Kathryn, Brian, and Cabel I think we really found new ways to look at all the ways McDonald’s touches everything. Perhaps we have exhausted most of our own thoughts about it, but there was something so exciting about diving into what the golden arches mean to others.

Like last year we did find a pretty good process (at least for an almost entirely volunteer effort). We had plan for each episode, a run of show, and questions and ideas lined up to talk about. When Chris switched us over to Riverside it also was a big improvement for the social clips.

Oh yeah, and social clips worked! I didn’t do as many as I would have liked (and will continue to make more) but it was really motivating to see thousands of people watching clips of the show and figuring out what worked and what didn’t.

What didn’t work?

Trying to do as much social media as I wanted wasn’t feasible. We also really taxed Chris with the edits! It’s just such an all out effort to make the show that I think everyone was putting in a LOT of work.

Process was improving but we never quite got there. And that meant we sometimes had bad communication with each other. This meant we didn’t always give Kriss the best indication of the focus of the show for her illustrations, or we didn’t consider the lighting and images of the clips enough, and other little things that end up mattering.

I didn’t think to go back and actually read my old AAR! That was a mistake.

Why?

Being an all volunteer effort makes it very hard. This endeavor feels like it should be a full time job, and it was especially hard to combine this with working shifts at McDonald’s.

We were also a completely remote group operating mostly thru text messages. That’s just hard. It was easy to lose a link or forget to read something or be waiting on feedback someone else missed. (Also, i’m historically bad at texting.)

What About Next Time?

What would you do the same next time?

Hire Chris!
Do a limited series for the season.

What would you do differently next time?

Have way more guests (maybe every episode?).
Do more pop culture episodes (Monopoly scandal, The Founder review, etc.).
Launch with sponsors in place (and only launch with a plan to make money).
Create merch ahead of time.
Plan an event for launch or finale. Or both.

To Smell or Not to Smell?

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 17:16:41 GMT

There are two co-workers who noticeably “smell good.” One is a manager and when he walks by he leaves a pleasant invisible trail. The other is a co-worker I occasionally work drive through with, and standing side by side with him is more pleasant than most because he smells so nice.

I find the smell of both of them especially refreshing because it’s McRib season.

When lunch hits the restaurant fires up the McRib Sauce Cauldron and the smell is pretty overwhelming. The entire restaurant starts to reek of a Texas BBQ science experiment, an elixir of industrial food production. It’s not awful, but it’s not nice. When a co-worker with a distinct scent walks by it’s the odor equivalent of finding a nice patch of shade in the park on a hot summer day.

🗳️ Should I wear a scent at work?

Earlier this year I worked with my friend Chloe Coover to find a signature scent for KmikeyM. Chloe is the co-host of Nose Candy, a perfume podcast, and she helped me come up with some options I was planning to put to a shareholder vote. The only problem was that there was a very clear winner.

Of the seven samples I tested the only one that worked was Copper from Comme des Garçons. Chloe’s notes for this scent, in relation to KmikeyM, were:

Cold, metallic, and reminiscent of coins, Comme Des Garçon’s Copper was the first fragrance that came to mind when undertaking this project. Masculine and grassy, in addition to its resemblance to currency.

And it passed the test of both Kathryn and a number of friends! With no contest to speak of the vote became more difficult to craft… I no longer needed help deciding which scent was the most KmikeyM. But now that I work in an industry with strong smells, the idea of an odor of my own is more appealing.

Collect Burgers, Carry Fries

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 17:22:28 GMT

The 1990 song Enlightenment by Van Morrison opens with the lyrics “Chop that wood, carry water,” which is a reference to a verse in an eighth century Chinese poem by Layman P’ang:

No matter who tries to leave their mark,
The hills and dales are not impressed.
Collecting firewood and carrying water
Are prayers that reach the gods.

This is a kind of how it feels working at the hamburger restaurant, except that my regular tasks deal with burgers and french fries. I take orders, use the POS system, and collect fries from the freezer… over and over and over again.

I wake up at five in the morning, I put on my uniform, and I become an invisible cog in the mighty machine.

And while this is the literal embodiment of the term “McJob” there is something satisfying about the work. I like the speed of it and am continually impressed with the operational efficiency (in spite of noticing a thousand ways it could work just a little bit better). My contribution leaves no mark and I’m totally replaceable.

The individual “I” that is Mike is not useful, important, or even considered. Mike doesn’t exist at the hamburger restaurant. But when I take up my position at the drive thru, I become an invaluable member of the team. I am the finger that pushes the buttons, the voice taking orders, and the body carrying boxes of fries. I occupy the space required and perform the role of a crucial part of the operation, even as very little of “Mike” seeps out.

But last week I left my mark.

The drive thru station is right beside one of the hand washing sinks. It’s in almost constant use as people come on shift or change tasks. The sink has an automated towel dispenser, automated soap dispenser, and for some reason manual water knobs. One of the problems with how everything is laid out is that there wasn’t room to mount the soap dispenser above the sink, so it’s off to the side a little. Being an automated dispenser means that the soap is not always caught, and being off to the side means the soap lands on the floor.

For months this drove me crazy, and first in my mind’s eye, and then later in a sketch pad, I thought of a way to create a soap catcher by having a wire hanger held over the dispenser with a little chain leading down to a metal circle that could hold a small cup.

While on shift I would imagine going to the hardware store and then coming in early to install it. By the time my shift ended I abandoned the idea as I was overcome with the joy of going home.

But then, last week… there was some string hanging by the Drive Thru area left over from a promotional sign. I unravelled it, and measured it around the dispenser. I walked to the front and asked for a pair of scissors from the manager. I walked to the drink assembly area and chose an extra small cup. I used a thumbtack from the bulletin board to poke two holes in it. I stuck two paperclips (leftover from the bills for the cash drawer) into the holes and attached the string.

All of this was happening in fits and spurts between orders. I’d get one part done, and then have to stop as a little rush of cars came through the drive-thru, then I’d get back to it for a few moments. Eventually I finished it. My masterpiece…

CBC ❤️ HBR

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 10:19:10 GMT

Peter Armstrong, the Senior. Business Correspondent at the CBC, wrote a glowing recommendation of Hamburger Business Review in his Mind Your Business newsletter:

Hamburger-nomics

I’ve been dying to write about this podcast.

Regular readers know how much I love finding projects that try to tell us important stories in clever and interesting ways.

Well, let me introduce you to Hamburger Business Review. Season 2 of the podcast series just dropped, and I absolutely love it.

The concept is quite simple. Mike Merrill and co-host Zach Rose got to talking about McDonald’s one day. Specifically, they were talking about the sheer volume of case studies in the Harvard Business Review that focus entirely on McDonald’s.

So, they launched a podcast, where they would go through a case study per episode to see what they could learn. And they learned a lot.

I reached out to Merrill to ask about his takeaway from doing the podcast.

“There’s nothing in the world that McDonald’s doesn’t touch,” he told me.

The company employs two million people. The case studies cover everything from currency speculation to labour law to supply chain management.

“It’s the No. 1 toy distribution company in the world, via the Happy Meal. [McDonald’s] touches everything, and it does it at such scale that it is mind-boggling,” Merrill said.

Here’s the best part, though. Leading up to the new season, Merrill came up with another idea.

He got himself a job at a certain hamburger restaurant. He doesn’t want to name said restaurant because that might land him in hot water. So, he merely calls it The Hamburger Restaurant.

“What if I get a job at there as part of this exploration of this from the other end? So we’re looking at it from that business school case study lens, but then I’m also just day in and day out grinding it out on the floor of the restaurant,” he told me.

Working there has given him yet more insight into the megalithic structure of the company, but also about the people that work there.

“I’ve never loved my co-workers more in a job in any job that I’ve worked,” he said. “The level of care and attention they give is amazing.”

Merrill is a super-interesting character. In 2008, he sold shares in… himself. Seriously. He did an interview with Wired magazine explaining the process.

“He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company,” wrote Wired’s Joshua Davis.

He sold nearly 1,000 shares and made a tidy little profit.

“He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be non-voting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life,” wrote Davis.

Merrill still holds shareholder meetings and asks his shareholders to weigh in on decisions.

The point is, the podcast is fascinating, very fun and every time I listen to an episode, I learn something interesting.

Check out Hamburger Business Review here.

HBR S2E1: My Hamburger Restaurant

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 05:41:43 GMT

Kicking off a new a week in the hamburger business!

We are so excited to start the new season with our producer Chris Higgins and an updated format for the podcast:

News
My Hamburger Restaurant
Case Study Review

We recap and add a little context on each of these sections for you in the newsletter below but then we also have:

Finance
A Review of the Chicken Big Mac
Some Political Reflections

Let’s get into it…

News

As we prepped for recording this episode we were still reeling from the news of E. coli cases related to the Quarter Pounder. The story continued to develop but it was the perfect tie-in to our case study about supply chains.

At the time the CDC was reporting 49 confirmed cases and one death. The investigation was looking at the possible culprit being either the slivered onions or the beef with cases spiking the most in Colorado.

CNN then reported, “McDonald’s supplier Taylor Farms has removed yellow onions from the market ‘out of an abundance of caution.’”

A commercial artist works on a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder billboard in 1973

Then on October 24th AP News reported the official word from McDonald’s:

Taylor Farms, of Salinas, California, sent onions to one distribution facility [in Colorado], which led the fast-food chain to remove Quarter Pounder hamburgers from restaurants in several states. McDonald’s didn’t say which facility it was.

The story has continued to develop as we recorded so we created this video timeline using various news reports:

What Does This Mean for the Quarter Pounder?

In a New York Times article economics professor Jay Zagorsky said:

“I don’t see this as really affecting McDonald’s dramatically. And I think Wall Street agrees with me because the stock is only down about 5 percent.”

The Quarter Pounder is a big deal to McDonald’s, and was highlighted as an important brand itself in the 2023 Investor Update event. The NYT article closes with the following endorsement:

After McDonald’s made the switch from frozen to fresh beef, which boosted sales by 30 percent, even a Food & Wine critic was impressed.

“The Quarter Pounder, if you’re asking, was pretty good, in the muted way that Quarter Pounders generally are — a classic, simple thing, with enough heft to make you feel like you’ve had a meal, without having to order fries or guzzle sodas,” David Landsel wrote. “Sometimes, simple is good.”

My Hamburger Restaurant

Probably the biggest change to this season of HBR is that Mike is now working at a hamburger restaurant in southern California. Our producer Chris Higgins interviews Mike about why he chose this and what his first few weeks have been like.

Mike compares his memory of working at a hamburger restaurant now and when he worked part-time at McDonald’s back in high school. He has developed a fan-theory that the world of Star Trek is actually the result of McDonald’s being the last global organization after an apocalyptic event that destroyed capitalism. But we’ll save the details of that theory for another time.

Case Study

Our case study today is all about sustainability and supply chains, but obviously food safety was very much on our minds as we analyzed it.

You can pick up a copy of McDonald’s Corp.: Managing a Sustainable Supply Chain by Ray A. Goldberg and Jessica Droste Yagan at the Harvard Business Review store for $11.95. Both Zach and Mike agree that this is one of the best case studies they have ever read.

The case study is a Shakespearean story of two warring brands — McDonald’s and Greenpeace — and how they came together to fight the clearcutting of the Amazon rainforest. While the focus of the piece is on McDonald’s and its willingness to work with Greenpeace, we were far more fascinated by the complexity of the supply chain logistics required to run a global operation like McDonald’s.

Greenpeace was able to use people dressed in chicken suits to elucidate every otherwise invisible connection that makes up the supply chain — how the chicken in McNuggets is fed soy that is grown on farms that are built on the recently deforested tracts of land within the fragile ecosystem of the Amazon.

Next Up: McDonald’s China: The Expired Meat Scandal

That’s the first episode of the second season! We have more information to share below, and stay tuned for the next episode where we are planning to look at the The University of Hong Kong’s case study McDonald’s China: The Expired Meat Scandal.

If you enjoy Hamburger Business Review you can support us by subscribing, buying merch, or even just buying us a burger.

Subscribed

Finance

Even before the E. coli outbreak that caused the share price to drop we had CEO Chris Kempczinski say in early October that he expects 2025 to be “another challenging year.” This was in reference to the rising costs of providing so much beef to customers.

Kempczinski said on Thursday that McDonald’s will aim to offer more affordable meals by including chicken-based items on the menu since poultry is more than half the cost of beef on a per-pound basis.

Which explains the launch of the Chicken Big Mac from an economic point of view.

This shift in the focus on protein and the concerns about 2025 being difficult have been largely overshadowed by all the political shenanigans as well as the recent E. coli outbreak which has had a major impact on the share price.

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Should Hamburger Business Review Do Food Reviews?

We are a business podcast, but as my mom says, everyone’s gotta eat. In the burger business, new products are a great marketing strategy. But is the new take on an old favorite really any better? Can it move the needle?

And the real question is, should HBR do food reviews? Do you care what we think about the Chicken Big Mac? Should we compare smash burgers across LA? What about blind taste tests of French fries? We’re no Doughboys, but if you’d like our take on “product”, let us know:

Response to October Surprise

Mike was surprised the response to the T@McD event at his hamburger restaurant was… nothing. No one said a word about it. Of course the online discussions in the of McD employees had a lot to say. Here are some highlights from Reddit:

“I’d like to see him running headset while running fryers and making multiple mcfrappes at once, during a rush.. I doubt he figured out how to use the cash registers..”

“w/Trump there is always a certain irony, a playfulness, where he knows you are in on the joke and you’re both having fun. You both know who he is, who he is pretending to be, and it’s not at all malicious.”

“This is cosplay and insulting to people who have actually worked any amount of time in their lives.”

And one of our favorite hamburger writers, Marcia Chatelain, author of the incredible Franchise book, wrote a great NYT Opinion piece and was on CNNdiscussing how political theatrics block political change.

In the grand scheme of everything that is lining up to happen for the next four years this event might seem small. But we believe it remains the second most iconic image of the campaign and it highlights our theory about how McDonald’s touches everything.